Game Freak
In the spring of 1996, Game Freak's president Satoshi Tajiri used the Japanese manga journal "CoroCoro Comic" as an experimental exhibition of Mew and distributed the first cards of it for the card game as free giveaways, which surprised many at Game Freak, including Morimoto. Due to the success of the experiment on April 15, 1996, Game Freak announced a contest to publicly release Mew to 151 winners. Tajiri described using Mew to create hype around an "invisible character" within the game and to keep interest alive in the title and create rumors and myths about the game passed around by word of mouth, which resulted in increased sales for the game.