i finally managed to trigger the event, following the "gaming how it was"
guide.
http://wtfhashappenedtogames.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/misfortunegb-is-real-how-to-find-it.html

heres the save file. load it into pkmn yellow and talk to the npc directly
north of you to run the event for yourself.
id recommend making a save state once the event loads, since theres this
whole annoying glitch textbox you gotta sit through.

i dont remember how many tries it took. i just kept throwing attempts
at it over and over until something happened, cause i apparently dont
have anything better to do over quarantine.

the person who wrote the guide doesnt seem entirely trustworthy to me.
there are two points in the guide where they say that you "might as
well reset" (if the old man catches the pokemon during the tutorial,
and if the badge screen looks normal during one of the last steps).
i only triggered the event once i stopped caring about resetting and
played the "dead" runs through to the final step anyway. i
dont remember if the old man caught the pokemon in the run
that actually worked tho.

i dont know for sure why nothing at all related to the misfortune event
appears in the decompilation, but i have a couple theories:

my first guess would be that the event's data is split up into tiny
little fragments throughout the rom and following the steps of the
guide manages to somehow piece those fragments together in memory.
to the people decompiling the game, the individual fragments would
be too small to make sense of and would maybe just be assumed to be
garbage data or padding of some kind.

but that'd take a crazy amount of foresight on the programmers part:
how would they even think to make the event decompilation-proof if the
technology that would allow for a decompilation wouldn't be available
for another twenty years?

my only other thought is that if the event's data isnt present in the
rom decompilation, then maybe its stored somewhere other tham rom?
ive heard a theory that, since the event appears in so many different
games, its data is stored within the gameboy itself rather than any
individual cartridge. maybe thats what the demon thing means when they 
say they "exist within the very fabric of reality"; the fabric of reality,
for these games, is the gameboy.

the event works when i load the save onto an emulator tho, 
so if it is stored on the gameboy, i would have a few choice
questions for the devs of bgb.

if its not stored in rom and its not on the gameboy, that doesnt leave
too many other options. it would need to be stored in some kind of ram,
but ram only persists for as long as the console is powered on; except,
of course, for sram - the save file. the theory im invested in
nowadays is that the event's data is loaded into sram sometime before
the games are shipped. maybe the event wasnt even written by the devs
of the games its hidden in; it could be something that some factory
worker managed to sneak into some carts as they were heading out!
the functions in the game that clear the save file dont necessarily
need to clear the entirety of sram, only the parts that the game uses
for its save data. the rest can be left as whatever came in from the
factory. maybe that's why the event's been so damn hard to trigger -
it needs to be done on a cartridge with a factory save file!
an emulator's random noise or 0x00 fill of sram wouldnt allow for
the event to occur! and, heck, most of the carts that you can buy off
the internet have had their save batteries replaced by now, so the
factory save wouldve been destroyed. i told you i wasnt crazy for always
backing up my save files!

of course, if that theory doesnt work out, i suppose its always possible
that the spooky ghost demons fly their way into your gameboy and make
their own video game as a way to haunt you using their spooky ghost demon
powers :P
