Pokémon GO turned ten this week, and Niantic is marking it in the least Pokémon GO way imaginable: by giving away, for free, the single most sought-after thing in the game. Every Trainer can now claim a Mewtwo with perfect stats - a hundo, 15/15/15 - plus a Master Ball, for completing Timed Research that takes about as long as a walk to the corner shop.
What you get, and what it costs you
The free Timed Research went live on Wednesday, August 12 at 4:00 PM PDT and runs until Sunday, September 6 at 11:59 PM local time. The tasks are deliberately trivial: catch ten Pokémon, power up Pokémon ten times. Catching ten is enough on its own to earn a Master Ball. Finish the rest and you reach an encounter with a Mewtwo carrying maxed-out stats and a special commemorative background.
The kicker is the Mega line. The Mewtwo from this research arrives with the third Mega Level for Mega Mewtwo Y already unlocked - the grind that normally takes months of repeat Mega Evolutions, handed over at the door. For anyone who has spent a decade raiding Mewtwo and settling for a 14/15/13, that is the part that stings pleasantly.
The one asterisk
Trainers who caught Mewtwo at the July 9 Times Square in-person event are treated differently: they receive a variant with different stats and rewards, and Niantic has indicated the Times Square-background Mewtwo may return separately at a later date. Everyone else gets the standard hundo.
Ten years is a strange milestone for this game
Pokémon GO launched in July 2016 into a summer that genuinely reorganized public parks for a few weeks. A decade on it has outlived the novelty cycle, three or four rounds of "is it dead yet" discourse, a pandemic that forced Niantic to rewrite its own core design around staying indoors, and - more recently - a change of corporate ownership. Handing every active player a perfect Mewtwo is both a thank-you and a reasonably shrewd re-engagement move: the fastest way to get a lapsed Trainer to reopen the app is to tell them something free and genuinely rare is sitting in it.
Do it before September 6
The research and its rewards both expire on September 6 at 11:59 PM local time - tasks completed but unclaimed after that point are gone. It is a low bar to clear, but it is the kind of thing that is easy to leave sitting in the research tab until the window quietly closes. Pokémon GO is free on iOS and Android.
