How Mew Saved Pokemon
Pokemon Red and Green initially got off to a slow start in Japan--until players discovered a secret 151st Pokemon hidden in the games.
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So pervasive was Pokemon in the late '90s and early 2000s that it's easy to assume the franchise was an immediate hit right from the outset--but that wasn't exactly the case. As it happens, the original Pokemon Red and Green versions actually got off to a rather inauspicious start when they first launched in Japan in 1996, two years before the property made its international debut. Initial sales were so sluggish that developer Game Freak worried that the games might have missed the proverbial "last train"--and that could very well have been their fate were it not for a secret Pokemon hidden within their code.