I see you’re using a POKEDEX, when you catch a pokemon, your POKEDEX is automatically updated.
What!?
Don’t you know how to catch pokemon?
I’ll Show you how to then.
Missingno!
(Occasionally known as the old man glitch) is the most infamous oopsy in all of Pokemon.
It’s responsible for a strange amount of mystery, lore, and (of course) cheating.
Talk to the old man, fly to cinnabar island, surf up and down the east coast and BAM!
You’ll run into a bunch of impossibly leveled, pokemans and eventually you’ll hit...this
bundle of pixels.
Missingno!
Just by encountering this abstract fellow, the 6th item in your bag will increase by
128 unless you’ve already got 128 of them.
The intelligent/lazy used this glitch on rare candies back in the day.
Why NOT use an infinite supply of level ups to bolster your pokemon team?
Many link cable battles were made sour over this but let’s be honest if you used rare
candy pokemon against your friends your favorite book was definitely Mein Kampf and are probably
still a virgin.
I even knew a guy with a whole team of level 100s thanks to the rare candy cheat but I
beat him with my properly trained level 80 somethings.
Rare candies aren’t a replacement for having no life, Kyle.
For real tho I hope you got laid at least once in the last 20 years.
Anyway, that’s how you encounter missingno in Pokemon red and blue and that was one of
the notable effects the missingno glitch had on our collective pokemon experience.
But...why am I talking about this now?
In 2019.
If you don’t know, my name is Grant and I’m talking about this now because it’s
been on my mind not ONLY for the past six months as a video idea but ALSO it’s been
on my mind for the last couple decades as a weird mystery that never went away.
Pokemon, like nothing ever before, captured the imagination and sense of wonder that children
feel about the world.
As a kid, I dreamed of traveling from town to town, adventuring through forests, deserts,
mountains to ultimately be the very best like no one ever was.
All pokemon fans did.
But I also had nightmares and waking fears about ghosts and anything that might jump
out from the darkness.
Most kids did.
Ghost stories really messed me up as a pre-teen and younger.
Something about people or something stranger existing between this reality and somewhere
else was a spookiness I simply could not get out of my head.
It was a big problem actually and this video is the first time I ever talked about it.
HOWEVER!
In that constant, swirling mix of existential dread came Pokemon: a massive inspiration
for any kid who ever wanted to explore the vastness of the world and all its nooks and
crannies.
Every town, biome, and adventure waiting to happen all tied together into a show that
took the world by storm.
It had depth to it too.
Lurking beneath the surface of this candy-coated world of discovery and collecting was also
lore.
Hearsay, myths, legends.
There were the old stories about Kabuto and Aerodactyl and how they were the ancestors
of many modern Pokemon.
There was Mew, the ancestor of EVERY pokemon ever who roamed the primordial earth by itself
until it split into every pokemon we see today.
Then there were the legendary birds, creatures who lurked in strange places whose power could
be harnessed if you were anywhere close to being the very best like no one ever was.
All of this solidified the Pokemon universe as a place defined by the tickle of adventure
built over a background of mythology.
It felt real and to me it was very comforting.
By the time you were entranced by the shiny call to adventure, one couldn’t help but
wonder what else lay hidden in this world that felt so welcoming.
Missingno, in all it’s strangeness, in all its usefulness to dirty cheaters, is THE mystery
that shattered reality enough to always be lurking in the back of our minds.
At least it’s always been in the back of my mind.
But why?
What is missingno?
How does it work?
And what were its effects on Pokemon as a whole?
Well gentle viewer, if you think your brainhole is ready for a pleasurable penetraysh that
climaxes with hot knowledge from days of old then give your mom’s number to Professor
Oak and PREPARE YOURSELF for the first time reality felt wobbly to the kids of the 90s,
for the story of a backwards L-shaped enigma who dared to capture our imaginations in ways
that barely made sense.
This is the story of Missingno, the story you never knew.
You thought there would be no intro.
BUT I CAN PUT THE INTRO ANYWHERE.
EVEN AT THE END OF A VIDEO IF I WANT.
Hah!
Alright.
We’ve got the big picture intro stuff out of the way so let’s dive into the nitty
gritty.
For every supernatural experience, there is an explanation as to how it happened.
Be it scientific or something weirder.
In Missingno’s case, it’s scientific...basically.
It’s all in the code!
What strange mishap of programming lead to its existence?
Allow me to walk you through it, yon sheeple.
When you talk to the old man in Viridian City, this (unlike every other pokemon battle we
see) is a scripted cutscene.
While normally your name is the one to start sentences like [if only your mom had] used
a pokeball or [if only your mom had] used a potion, this time Old Man occupies that
spot.
Programming wise, this means that “Old Man” has temporarily replaced your name in the
game’s memory while your name has been saved elsewhere for safe keeping.
Turns out, the place your name is temporarily stored during the Old Man cutscene is the
same place that determines which wild pokemon you encounter.
Normally this would be no issue since this data is updated whenever you step foot in
tall grass or any place where pokemon might jump out at you, BUT there is one part of
the world where Pokemon encounter data is not updated upon entering a place where pokemon
can be encountered.
This is, of course, the east coast of cinnabar island.
Remember that the Old Man’s name is still where our name should be and our name is stored
where encounter data exists.
This means...yes!
When going directly from the Old Man’s pointless tutorial to cinnabar island, the letters in
our name determine which pokemon we’ll encounter and what levels they’ll be.
Now this is pretty simple but I’m gonna explain it anyway.
The “Wild Pokemon Data” section of memory is 18 bytes and is separated into nine two
byte sections.
The first byte of each section determines the level of the pokemon you’ll find.
The second determines it’s ID.
So let’s say I named myself PikaPeen.
The first letter of your name isn’t actually stored in the Wild Pokemon Data, it’s riiiight
before it.
So let’s start with the second.
“I” in hexadecimal (the number system often used in coding) is equal to 0x69. 0x69
in decimal (the number system we usually use) is equal to 105.
THEREFORE we would have a chance of encountering a level 105 pokemon.
Then the third letter “k” is equal to 6B in hex which translates to 107 in decimal
which is the ID for...Hitmonchan!
This means you’ll have a 1 in 9 chance of encountering a level 105 hitmonchan.
Remember Wild Pokemon Data is made of nine two byte sections hence a 1 in 9 chance.
But what if you had a letter in your name that made the game do something really weird?
You’re probably aware there are a total of 151 pokemon with valid ID’s and you may
not be aware that these ID’s were stored in a data structure with a total of 255 slots.
That leaves over a HUNDRED slots with nothing in them so if a Wild Pokemon Encounter happened
to take place with an ID number in those slots then you got good ol’ Missingno.
So that’s how that works.
EZ.
Git gud.
But what now?
We know how missingno works in the code but how does it work...in our minds?
Why the widespread myth?
Well there’s a couple layers to this.
The first being...Missingno is one of the only pokemon myths to actually be real.
Many heard you could find Mew under a truck near the SS Anne.
I remember hearing you could catch Togepi if you could get to that unreachable grass
just outside Pallet Town.
Did you hear that one too?
What about the ever elusive pikablue?
The myth that you could catch starter Pokemon if only you could get to Bill’s backyard.
Turns out the only thing you can catch in bills backyard is hep c.
Even if you didn’t know about any of these, Missingno was a myth that was true.
It reached into our minds and told us that strange things could be found in this world
if you looked hard enough.
Then there’s the “glitchy” aspect of it.
While Missingno was a legend in and of itself, it’s not like the legendary birds or even
mewtwo.
These legends were real too but Missingno had a whole other level to it.
It wasn’t just a creature with a cool backstory that required an adventure to capture, it
could actually glitch your game.
If you catch it, Hall of fame data will become corrupted and if you battle with missingno
in your party, trainer sprites will be scrambled and all sprites will be reversed.
Heck if you trade it to pokemon stadium it’ll show up as a doll.
WHY??!
The effects of this thing are ALL over the place.
Also Missingno’s default move is water gun.
THIS THING KNOWS WATER GUN.
It can also learn Sky Attack.
AND this particular sprite isn’t the only one you can encounter.
Missingno can also appear as a ghost from pokemon tower, a kabutops fossil, and an Aerodactyl
fossil.
These sprites are mysterious and even creepy in their own right.
Not to mention, if these three sprites were captured they would learn the moves of the
last pokemon whose data was accessed.
It’s so weird.
But this aint no creepy pasta.
Missingno was never meant to exist in a world meant to be explored.
It could help you cheat or help you stay awake at night wondering if reality would fold in
on itself if your panic attacks got bad enough.
In our word, IRL, there are myths too.
Everything from Bigfoot to ghosts to La Chupacabra to goddang ALIENS, weird stories haunt our
imagination and just never go away.
Are they real?
Growing up I was afraid of the dark for fear that these things might be.
I mean ghosts specifically, la chupacabra, big foot and aliens aren’t something that
concerned me too much.
As I said in the beginning, I had quite the fear of ghosts.
Ghost stories are the reason that before going to bed, I would turn on the lamp next to my
bed before I turned the main lights off.
Then once I was safely under the covers, I’d turn off that beautiful, light-bring lamp
lamp so that I never had to tread foot in the darkness.
The stories were always the same.
In the right place at the right time with the wrong mindset, watery, translucent entities
could appear.
Maybe you’d barely catch them out of the corner of your eye.
Or they’d scratch you or throw things off shelves or cause massive temperature fluctuations
out of nowhere.
Whatever way a ghost decided to make its presence known, it did it through supernatural means
and the stories were always unsettling and usually sparked by tragedy.
I admit I’ve never seen a ghost.
I’ve never had a supernatural experience of any kind but I’ll never forget being
a kid and obsessing over these creepy stories that ran rampant in my head thanks to shows
like Pokemon and I guess even Ghost Adventures.
Even at noon on a Tuesday I’d worry about night time when I would be alone in my dark
room trying to sleep.
For me, Missingno played into that existential dread in a way that was...comforting.
Ghosts are terrifying because they’re never quite here nor there.
If they exist at all, they are between realities.
Between life and death.
Because of this, ghosts are ethereal, impossible to really define and impossible to really
truly analyze.
But Missingno haunts your cartridge.
It’s was right there.
It was real.
And despite it’s spookiness, it was tied in with the candy-coated world of pokemon
and that made all the difference.
It brought with it a change in how I see the world.
No longer were glitches in the matrix something to fear, they were worth exploring and could
be understood.
Missingno was a fold in reality that could be shared with eyes and ears as objectively
true.
Even captured and contained, at your own risk of course.
While I’m not suggesting you hit up your local haunted house with a tape recorder,
Missingno gave me a shift in perspective that quelled obsessive thoughts by making real
something that felt out of this world.
When I look back on the ubiquity of Missingno, at all the intrigue and speculation I can’t
help but wonder if everyone else felt the same way.
Did you have the same struggles I did?
Did this backwards L intrigue you in ways you never really forgot?
I’m Grant and that’s my story of Missingno: the story you never knew.
I’d like to hear yours.
See I told you I could do the intro whenever I want.
Now you have to believe me.
Anyway, I hope you liked the video.
This was a weird one!
I never thought I’d actually make a video on Missingno, but when the opportunity arose,
I took it!
I am serious though, let me know down below if missingno spoke to you in a weird existential
dread kind of way.
If you liked this video, I’d recommend checking out my story you never knew on Let’s Go
Pikachu and Eevee.
I thought it came out great so I know you’ll like it too.