Full Documents Related to the Distribution, the full copy of Pokemon Power Volume 6 is attached to this post:
In the Fall of 1998 Nintendo Power held a contest to “Win Mew for your Pokémon collection!” 151 winners of this contest would be given the chance to mail their cartridge into the Nintendo Power Headquarters and receive it back with a brand-new mew on their game save. Contest winners were notified by mail by 2/28/1999 that they had won the contest, making this the earliest known Mew distribution in the west.
Recently while browsing reddit, I ran across a post from Th4tGuyUKn0 showcasing his Original Red cartridge that was one of the lucky recipients of this contest. After scrolling through the thread, Th4tGuyUKn0 stated that the battery on the game had not yet dried out; upon reading this I immediately messaged him explaining Project Pokémon and asked him if he would be interested in dumping his game save. Luckily, he was all for it! The only problem was he could not remember which of his five Pokémon cartridges he left the mew on, and did not want to risk draining the more than two decades old cartridge battery by checking. Th4tGuyUKn0 graciously decided to send me all of his cartridges so that I could backup the saves and hopefully find the mew.
With the amazing research done by @suloku on these save files, we are confident that we have found the Mew in question. In the Pokemon Blue game save we discovered a Mew with the TID 51273 (the same Mew ID# printed on the back of the cartridge) and the OT ‘MARIO’. Suloku has concluded that this Mew is definitely legit. It shares the exact same DVs as the YOSHIBA Mew, matches Mew machine distributions data-wise, and has the same OT Nintendo character naming convention that several forum posts from 2000~ reference. While this does raise questions about what distribution the supposed ‘NINTEN’ Mews are a part of, this Nintendo Power Mew is most certainly legit. Suloku was also able to find the Mew in the red save file as a deleted Pokémon (moved or deleted pokémon can be found in box savedata if it was not overwritten by another pokémon being stored in the same slot).
Attached is the the .pk1 of the 1998 Nintendo Power 'MARIO' Mew. Thanks very much again to Th4tGuyUKn0 for sending and trusting us with these cartridges and Suloku for all of the great research, none of this would have been possible without them. Happy holidays and enjoy!
151 - MEW - C23C.pk1
Pokemon Power vol 6.pdf