Part 3: Surf's Up

Say hello to MISSINGNO. (That doesn't rhyme, I swear.) Missingno. is world-famous. This isn't the way he was discovered, but now you know how to encounter him as early as you want. But what IS he?

Basically, he is a "glitch Pokémon" which is basically the result of taking non-Pokémon data and interpreting it as Pokémon data. More details on that are available in this article. Glitched sprite aside, there isn't too much more of interest about him, aside from his...unique ability.



See this? When you encounter Missingno., the 6th item in your inventory is incremented by 128 if it wasn't that high already. Yes. That's not 9 Rare Candies, that's 129. Item stacks don't normally go above 99!

Normally I would say "I have no words" but I can talk about why that happens, and it's a bit of a mouthful. See, in the RAM, the game stores the inventory data right after the "Seen" flags. Missingno.'s dex number is technically 000, which the game thinks is 256, so seeing it sets the 256th flag - but there's only 152 reserved Seen flags, so it sets a bit in your inventory!



Thus the item duplication glitch was born! Duplicate your Rare Candies and never grind again. Duplicate Full Restores and never faint again. Duplicate Nuggets. Duplicate TMs. Duplicate MASTER BALLS. Just put the item you want duplicated in the 6th slot, and away you go!

However, DON'T duplicate Key Items. Otherwise when you deposit them you'll wind up with 128 bike vouchers or whatever. Key Items don't stack and you can't get rid of them the normal way.



Moving on, I take the underground path so I can pick this up and duplicate it.



Welcome to Lavender Town, home of terrible internet ghost stories.



We're here for the Pokémon Tower, which I technically don't have to do, but to get the Master Ball, you have to go to Silph Co. which only opens up after the Pokémon Tower.



But I don't have the Silph Scope, so this might be an issue.



This is embarrassing, really. No matter which Pokémon you send out they'll ALWAYS be scared. Charizard? Blastoise? MEWTWO? Too scared. But, if we view the sprite of a Pokémon in the menu...



The ghost's form is revealed!

And Mew is still too scared to move. This is purely cosmetic.



You can also do it to the Marowak ghost.



How about YOU Go, PokéDoll!



It, it WORKED?! I guess they didn't account for the possibility of using an escape item there.

Wait...was that PokéDoll...shaped like a Cubone?...Oh god I'm a horrible person.



Lavender Town's good for one thing, though: It's the perfect setup for item duplication. Teleport away from that Fisherman, then lose to that Gambler.

By the way, changing Gamblers to "Gamers" in the remakes is the dumbest thing ever. Especially when the slot machines are still there!



Now, I bet you're all wondering...



...what will happen if I capture Missingno.?



Oh...a blank dex entry with glitch sounds...how does he weigh that much?

In the Japanese version, there's actually text there that reads "comment to be written". Some theorize that Missingno. is a placeholder for Pokémon that were ultimately cut, because there's actually 39 Missingno. in the game and the developers have stated that they intended to have 190 Pokémon in Generation 1.



Yes I'd like to -- wait WHAT.



Okay, I have an explanation for this, too. The game actually has an error handler of sorts: viewing a glitch Pokémon's dex entry causes it to turn into a Rhydon. Why Rhydon? I imagine because his ID is 0x01, making him the earliest "legal" Pokémon. This only happens once, however, because now Missingno.'s caught flag has been set.

Oh yeah, that reminds me. If you want to stop this from happening in the first place, encounter a Cubone. Why? Because the "Caught" flags are stored before the "Seen" flags. Remember, Missingno.'s dex number is 256, there are 152 "Caught" flags, and the 104th "Seen" flag is...Cubone's. I could view him in the PokéDex right now, even.



So I capture another one, and by the way, capturing him also causes the item duplication thing, so if you swap the sixth items with the select button, you could duplicate two items in one encounter. Anyhow, let's see his stats.



Nice...icon?



Bird type and TWO Water Guns, that's just hilarious!

There are, naturally, other glitch Pokémon out there, but I'll get them later. Can't have too much fun at once, right?

Oh yeah, before I forget, Pokémon with glitched sprites cause the Hall of Fame to get corrupted, because the game's trying to uncompress invalid data which then spills over into the Hall of Fame data. This is permanent even if you don't save. If you're not in the Hall of Fame yet, this doesn't really matter, so if you care about that data, do all your item duplications before that point. Or beat the Elite 4 twenty more times since the Hall of Fame eventually starts throwing out data on a first-in-first-out basis.



Glitch Pokémon can also cause this effect if they're your lead as a battle starts: Your sprite is scrambled, and the enemy faces the wrong way.



Attacking...does THAT. Looks very painful. You can fix this problem by viewing any dex entry or party member's stats screen.

Anyways, now that the basics of glitch Pokémon are laid out, I ask you...how would the Stadium games respond to them?



In Stadium 1, they show up as the Substitute doll, which is pretty funny. (Ignore the second doll showing up in the corner, that's an emulator problem.) Sadly you can't select any of them for battles.



Selecting one in this big list also causes the game to crash. And as for Stadium 2...



They turn into Ditto! They apparently can only enter battle with an item, which is strange. This lets you "convert" any glitch Pokémon you don't want anymore if you need to for whatever reason. Oh, and you'll notice that's not Ditto's normal color. That's because the Stadium games sometimes recolor your Pokémon based on their nickname. It's not really a "shiny" Pokémon like what Gen 2 has, though Stadium 2 does have shiny colors for anything that's shiny.

Speaking of Stadium 2, it has a bug of its own: Enter any battle mode, win a battle, then suspend. Then enter any Stadium mode and earn one extra continue. Now, should you lose a battle in that run, all you have to do is select "Suspend", and then "Continue without suspending" and it'll let you continue...conveniently forgetting to subract one continue. Oops!



Anyhow, back to crazy glitches. This one is huge. For safety reasons, I deposited my entire inventory and bought six junk items.



I encounter Missingno. to duplicate the sixth item, then toss two of them. This leaves me with 127 Antidotes.



I encounter him again, leaving me with 255 Antidotes. This game does NOT like the number 255 at all. For example, if I toss an item above the 255 stack in the list...



That happens. See, the game shifted every item up one space - but it STOPPED at the 255 stack! And you can keep tossing items above it to duplicate even more!



Ever wanted to mass-duplicate your items? Now you can! But there's a problem - every tossed item makes the game think there's one less item in the inventory than you actually have, which shifts up where it thinks the Cancel button is. You can buy more items to correct this, but you'll probably lose items below the 255 stacks. That does mean you can get rid of un-tossable items you don't need, however.



This next trick has two methods. I'll explain the one I didn't use first: Any item below the cancel button will still be read by events that take away an item, like the thirsty guards, the girl on the roof of the department store, or even the fossil guy in Cinnabar Island. If you keep tossing stacks of 255 items the game will eventually think there are zero items in your bag. Then you do one of those events I mentioned, the game takes the item and subtracts one from your inventory. 0 minus 1 is...heh, you'll see.

As for the method I'm using? Well, first let me explain one of the weirdest functions of the inventory: The select button swaps items, yes, but attempting to swap two stacks of the same item MERGES the two stacks. You know, just in case you bought two stacks of 99 Potions and then at some point use 50 from each stack and want to merge them. I have no idea why they thought you would need that feature, but here's what it means for me: The game thinks I only have one item at this point, but I can still swap with the second stack of Antidotes.



I toss 253 Antidotes out of the first stack, then swap it with the second stack. I wind up with 1 Antidote remaining for some reason. I swap the two stacks again.



You'll want to be in a Pokémon Center at this point for safety reasons. The game now thinks I have 255 items because it tried to subtract 1 from however many items I have, and it thought I had 0, so it caused an underflow!



Scroll down far enough and what do we find?



We find other parts of the game's RAM interpreted as items! There's only RAM space for 20 items, after all! But be VERY careful. There's bound to be glitch items in here with garbled names. Some of them are so long you have to push A multiple times to scroll through them. If the menu stops working, carefully push A multiple times until it starts working again. Do NOT accidentally select a glitch item.

So, what can we do in here? We can manipulate the game RAM in multiple ways. I recommend keeping the RAM map handy just in case. Swapping the right items can cause you to alter game settings, mess with variables that track progress, and even WRONG-WARP. Me, I want to see if there are any curious items in here I can use.



Hello, what have we HERE?



I've observed that some glitch items are safest to view in the Pokémon Center. However, while outside, I found THAT. I'm nowhere near a PC, though, and I don't want to swap items without knowing what they represent in the RAM. Maybe there's a safer way to get any item I please.



So I figured if I used this glitch to deposit items from the RAM I wouldn't mess anything up. But it turns out that the quantity of those Master Balls represent my Trainer ID. Oops! Now all my Pokémon will stop obeying me, because my ID doesn't match theirs, and I have no badges at all!



Then again, with duplicatable Master Balls, I could just catch new ones.



The mis-matched ID number even makes the game think your file is completely new and asks if you're sure you want to overwrite it, which always happens in every Generation after the first.



To fix your inventory, just keep purchasing items until you're back where you were. The game can thankfully overflow to reverse the underflow effect.

So, let's check out what these unused items do!



WHAT.



Well then. This thing lets me Surf with no badge! It's known as the "Surfboard" item for that reason. This is too awesome. I figured I would need the Soul Badge to Surf, but no need for that silly thing now!



Now what could this possibly do?



Predictably, it lets you view the PokéDex, suggesting they were going to make it a Key Item, not a menu option. Except it even works in battle and takes up a turn! What, was it going to be like the Final Fantasy Scan spell?...That'd be pretty awesome, actually.



However, using it in battle has a rather...nasty effect on the graphics. So this got me thinking...would the Surfboard do anything in battle?



Wh...what...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rWDdoaHWxk

I'm...I'm shocked I've never seen that before. When it happened I was choking with laughter.

What actually happens is, the Surfboard changed the sound bank the game was set to load from. It has different sound banks for battle noises and map noises, I guess? Oh yeah, and since I'm dumb and didn't show it, throwing a Ball in that state plays the "Oak rates your PokéDex" noise. Try it out yourself if you like.



Anyhow, we should probably move on with the game now, as we can now enter Fuschia City. And you know what that means?



Ha. Haha. AAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA