Started by Priya Natarajan (@priya_birds) ·
MissingNo. is the game reading your name as a Pokémon
5 sources · 27 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- Why does the MissingNo. glitch work?
- Ended at
- “missingno 6th item 128 why”
The Trail
- “how does the missingno glitch actually work” (google.com)
- MissingNo. (en.wikipedia.org)
- Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow (en.wikipedia.org)
- “old man glitch cinnabar explained” (youtube.com)
the one with the hex editor view finally made it click
- “missingno 6th item 128 why” (reddit.com)
What I came away with
Watching the old man's catching demo in Viridian temporarily copies your name into the memory used for wild encounters. Cinnabar's east coast doesn't load an encounter table of its own, so the game reads the bytes of your name as Pokémon. Some of those point to slots with nothing defined, and that's MissingNo.
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