/vr/ - Retro Games

To get one over on all the poor kids who could never hope to see or access any of the real world event-only content that's already programmed into their Pokemon games, Gamefreak decided to implement a very basic legitimacy checker in Fire Red, Leaf Green, and Emerald. This legitimacy check specifically targets Deoxys and Mew, the only two pokemon during gen 3 that were completely unobtainable outside of events.

If the game finds that a Mew or Deoxys have invalid encounter data, that is to say their summary page says they were caught on Route 2 or something which would only be possible using a gameshark to force their encounter, then the game will cause Mew and Deoxys to disobey, as if they were a high level traded pokemon and you lacked the badge to control it, on every single turn.
(valid encounters would be Birth Island for Deoxys, Faraway Island for Mew, or "A Far Away Place" for either which is just the generic encounter data for most event gift pokemon)

It's pretty easy to get around this now, but you can find a LOT of forum posts from kids trying to figure out why they can't use the pokemon they hacked into their games fair and square. Even if you want to argue in favor of protecting the authenticity of event shit, since this check only exists for these two pokemon and not anything else kids are likely to hack in, it always just seemed like a pointlessly mean thing to implement.