Missingno.
| Missingno. | |
|---|---|
| File:Missingno.jpg National Pokédex 'M - Missingno. (#000) - Bulbasaur Johto Pokédex n/a - Missingno. (#n/a) - n/a Hoenn Pokédex n/a - Missingno. (#n/a) - n/a | |
| Japanese name | Ketsuban |
| Evolves from | None |
| Evolves into | None |
| Generation | First |
| Species | Glitch Pokémon |
| Type | Bird / Normal |
| Height | (unknown) ( m) |
| Weight | [convert: invalid number] |
| Ability | None |
Missingno. ("missing number", like its Japanese name, けつばん (ketsuban), which is Japanese for "missing number") is a glitch Pokémon which is found in the Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow Game Boy games and likely owes its existence to a programming oversight. There have also been Missingno.-like glitches in other Pokémon games, which are even sometimes called a Missingno.; however, these aren't related to the Red/Blue or Yellow Missingno., and are usually only obtainable with some sort of game enhancing device. Encountering the Missingno. character has been known to interfere with the save game data in various ways, such as adversely affecting the Hall of Fame saved data, and sometimes corrupting the game cartridge over time. (For instance, when in battle with a wild Pokémon or challenging trainers, the images will be corrupted, as well as the player's Pokémon's image.) Missingno.'s presence also allows what is known as the "Rare Candy Cheat", the games' infamous item duplication bug. It is commonly used to duplicate valuable and hard to obtain items, such as Rare Candies. However, the duplication bug can affect any item in the game, not just Rare Candies.
Missingno. is arguably the most well-known Pokémon glitch. Missingno.'s most common and famous appearance is as a mass of pixels in a backwards 'L' shape that is similar to a Tetris piece (see picture in the infobox). However, it sometimes appears as a ghost from Lavender Tower before receiving the Silph Scope item (see picture to the left). Also, types of Missingno. can be found that have the sprite of the Aerodactyl or Kabutops Fossil from Pewter City's museum. In the Red and Blue versions, the only way to find a non-pixel Missingno. is by doing the following:
- Having a lowercase "y" as the third, fifth, or seventh letter in your player's name (to find a ghost Missingno.)
- Having a lowercase "x" as the third, fifth, or seventh letter in your player's name (to find an Aerodactyl Fossil Missingno.)
- Having a lowercase "w" as the third, fifth or seventh letter in your player's name (to find a Kabutops Fossil Missingno.)
This is why the Missingno. in the form of a mass of pixels is the most common form of Missingno., because it is able to appear without many naming restrictions.
It is believed by some that Missingno. was a deliberate glitch added by the programmers of the game to aid them in testing. Proponents of this theory argue that Missingno. probably allowed them to progress quickly by giving them access to many items straight away. This theory relies on the supposition that the beta version of the game had land paths to Cinnabar Island that were removed in the final version - this would be the area where Missingno. is usually caught (see "Details" for directions on how to find it). Others cite the requirement of progressing through about two-thirds of the game as proof that this is not the case, as well as the fact that Missingno. corrupts the game state, making it impossible to determine whether there are any bugs in the game as played normally. Other theory is that Missingno. was going to be the 4th legendary bird, but it was left in the making.
The truth about Missingno. seems to be that the name is called by a separate subroutine which detects an unused slot in an internal list. The programmers had the name MISSINGNO. (missing number) returned when no other name matched. Good programming practice in videogames is to never crash even when an unexpected error occurs.
Another glitch Pokémon similar to Missingno. exists, with a glitched name consisting of block shapes and the letter 'M'. This Pokémon, known as 'M, evolves into a Kangaskhan when it is given a Rare Candy. 'M is also commonly referred to as "'M Block".
Details
- Missingno. has the identification number #000.
- The most common Missingno. has the attacks Water Gun, Water Gun, and Sky Attack. The other versions' attacks are based on the starting moves of the last Pokémon to attack in battle, or seen in the Hall of Fame or Pokédex.
- Its cry is the same as Nidoran♂, only a little bit shorter. In the Stat screen, it has Rhydon's cry.
- The famous Missingno.'s types are Bird (not Flying - Bird-type may be a lost beta type about which little is known) and Normal.
- After encountering Missingno., players will find themselves with an increased amount of the sixth item on their item list - a glitch popular for duplicating items, especially rare items such as Rare Candies, Master Balls and hard to obtain TMs.
- If Missingno. is caught, it will not appear in the Pokédex. Because of this, there is no official Pokédex description for Missingno..
- If Missingno. is caught, strange things may happen to a person's game, but they should solve themselves after about 15 minutes, with the exception of the Hall of Fame glitch. Contrary to myth, it is untrue that capturing Missingno. will always delete a user's game. However, the fear of possible game deletion has in the past hindered research on the subject. (Further investigation shows it poses little danger to the game. It can safely be removed from the game and order restored with the exception of the Hall of Fame data.)
- While searching the coast for Missingno, Pokémon from the last 'wild' area visited sometimes appear. This is useful for getting Pokémon normally only found in the Safari Zone.
- Not only the last 'wild' areas visited may appear in the area. Occasionally, certain trainers or gym leaders may appear on the Cinnabar coast for no apparent reason, and they will usually have random Pokémon that will battle against the player. Because the trainers are random, the Pokémon they use vary, and may include glitch blocks similar to Missingno, or Pokémon over level 100. Some glitches may cause the game to freeze, such as an attack that causes a Pokémon to selfdestruct, but doesn't reduce any of its power.
- Pokémon and Trainers may appear glitched after Missingno. is captured. This can usually be solved by looking at the Stat screen of a "real" Pokémon.
- Missingno. has no evolutions (although one report shows it evolving to Kangaskhan - these results have not been duplicated and are being investigated further). However, 'M evolves into Kangaskhan.
- When viewed as part of the player's team, the icon changes depending on your current location.
- To some people, it is called "Missingo" (Pron. Miss-ing-go), making it sound like a real Pokémon.
Missingno. can be found in the wild in Pokémon Red and Blue due to a bug in the map design. Missingno. (and 'M) can be traded into the Yellow version of the game, ('M becomes 3trainerpoké) but cannot be traded into Pokémon Gold and Silver, the sequels to Red, Blue, and Yellow. When it is tried, Missingno. appears as a Tyrogue (or any other Pokémon) from the Gold/Silver perspective, and when the player tries to trade Missingno. a message appears that says "Your freind's <pokémon> appears to be abnormal" and the trade automatically cancels. Missingno. has been deliberately removed from all games after the Red and Blue versions. However, for the Yellow version, there are a few exceptions.
Missingno.-like creatures have been found in Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire. It appears as a black and white circle with an inner ?. It also appears as "??" in the PokeDex.
How to find Missingno.
The most common way to encounter Missingno. in the Red and Blue versions of Pokémon is to do the following:
- Go to the northern part of Viridian City, and watch the Old Man's demonstration on how to catch a Pokémon.
- Fly or Teleport to Cinnabar Island.
- Surf up and down along the east coast of the island until Missingno. appears. (Depending on the player's name, Missingno. may not show up.)
Theory on why Missingno. appears
One explanation states that whenever the game "sets up" the planned battle against the Weedle, it needs to change the player's character name to "OLD MAN" so that it will display "OLD MAN" instead of the name the player has entered. The programmers decided to use the area of data where wild Pokémon information is as a temporary storage area for the player's name. When the battle ends, the game will retrieve the player's name from its temporary storage place. The reasoning is that whenever the player goes anywhere else, such as Route 2, the game will automatically change that data to what it should be, plus, the player won't actually encounter any wild Pokémon in Viridian. Flying to another city doesn't seem to change that data (probably because cities don't have wild pokemon data.).
However, along Cinnabar Island's coast, there is no data for wild Pokémon programmed in due to the programmers forgetting to enter any data, so the wild Pokémon data will not be set to anything sensible. While surfing the coast, the player's character name will still be the wild Pokémon data in that area. This is an oversight on the part of the programmer due to the structure of the maps.
The name of the player has six hexadecimal values in it. The game needs only three "slots" of wild Pokémon data to store this. The wild Pokémon the player encounters along the coast are determined by the third, fifth, and seventh characters of the player's name, while the levels are determined by the second, fourth, and sixth characters, respectively.
Also, the player's name has an influence on what will appear on Cinnabar Island's east coast. For example, if a person decides that his/her name will be all question marks, he/she will run into a trainer on Cinnabar's coast after talking to the Old Man in Viridian City. This is because the more symbols (special characters) a player has in his/her name, the higher the chances are of a trainer appearing on the Cinnabar coast. If a trainer appears, the player will not be able to run away and the trainer has glitch Pokemon that can freeze the player's game. Additionally, the name DXDYDZD is able to grant lv 173 or so Mewtwos. It is easy to exploit, and therefore you shouldn't battle someone named that.
Information on how to determine what Pokémon and at what levels they appear at can be found at [1].
More Missingno. information
One rumor claims that the player must have five or less Pokémon with him or her if he or she actually tries to catch Missingno., otherwise, his or her game may malfunction when he or she tries to withdraw it from Bill's PC. (If a player has six Pokémon at the time Missingno. is caught, Missingno. will be sent to Bill's PC). This rumor is not necessarily true. People have reported the game rejecting and accepting Missingno., even on the same game pack
In Pokémon Red and Blue, if the player captures a Missingno. over level 100, and the Pokémon gains any experience in a battle, it will say "Missingno. has leveled up to level 100". When any Pokémon over level 100 is constantly given Rare Candies, eventually the Pokémon will get up to level 255, and then after level 255 the Pokémon will grow to level 0. However, as already mentioned, if a Pokémon over level 100 battles another Pokémon, it will grow down to level 100 (except in linked battles.) Pokémon going from level 255 to 0 and Pokémon going from a level above 100 back to 100 are the only known cases of Pokémon leveling down instead of up. The only other Pokémon known to "level down" in the Pokémon games are the Pokémon above level 100 encountered due to the same glitch as the one that reveals Missingno. This same glitch also sometimes allows players to catch over 100 Pokémon, including some that normally only appear once per game, such as the starter Pokémon.
Missingno. is one of many glitches that occur in the Red and Blue versions. Although similar, there seems to be no direct connection between Missingno. and Glitch City, another glitch that can be accessed. Missingno. has acquired much notoriety due to its presence in many Pokémon myths, especially those involving Mew. While these myths aren't true, Mew's popularity ensures that Missingno. will always have a place in Pokémon culture.
Apparently, when one activates the Missingno. Cheat, if that person ever goes in the power plant, their game will permenantly freeze. There is no evidence of this actually happening, so it may just be a myth.
Missingno's excistance owes itself to the way the gameboy works. The original Gameboy uses an 8 bit processor that without trickery, will only count in two hexidecimal figures, making FF, 255 the highest number. In one part of the cart's memory, where the pokemon are stored each pokemon had a number ID, which would range from 1-151, but there were actualy 255 spaces for them to exsist in, leaving blank spaces. I don't think anything was programmed in these spaces, so trying to access them has odd symptoms, like Missingno. Missingno is a number between 152 and 255 inclusive.
Missingno. in Pokémon Yellow
When Pokémon Yellow was released, the original Missingno. and 'M glitches were removed from the game. However, some time after Yellow was released, a new code was discovered that allowed the capture of any Pokémon, including Mew and Missingno. This code is detailed in a guide at the GameFAQs Pokémon Yellow page (said FAQ is Glitch Guide).
However, if a player is unsuccessful at finding Missingno. in the Yellow version, he or she can simply have it traded in from a Red or Blue version. If this is done, Missingno. will affect the Yellow version in the same way it affected the Red and Blue versions, including messing up the Pokemon Hall of Fame.
"Missingno". in other Pokémon games
In all later games including Pokémon Gold, Silver, Crystal, Ruby, Sapphire, FireRed, LeafGreen, and Emerald, there exist glitch-based Pokémon similar to Missingno. that are obtainable through game enhancing devices. Players often refer to these anomalies as Missingno. even though none of them explicitly carry the name MISSINGNO. within the games. The original Missingno. cannot be traded into the Gold or Silver versions (see this section.) Unlike the original Missingno. of Red, Blue, and Yellow, there are no proven techniques for obtaining these special Pokémon without use of a cheat device. However, a number of players claim to have encountered one such Pokémon, whose name and icon appear as a single large question mark in the Ruby and Sapphire versions, through in-game glitches. Glitch Pokémon like this can also appear in cloning in Crystal, becoming a game-freezing morphing version of the Pokemon, that was attempted to clone.
If Missingno. and/or 'M (glitch Pokémon found in the Game Boy games) are uploaded to Pokémon Stadium it will not mess up the game like some have suggested. When in Pokémon Stadium it will look like a substitute (a small Rhydon-like figure that usually appears only when a player has a Pokémon that uses the move Substitute.) Missingno.'s substitute will be purple and 'M's will be blue. When looked at in the Pokémon Center within Pokémon Stadium, all of Missingno./'M's stats will be question marks (even though the ID# is a question mark, the Game Boy game confirms that both Missingno. and 'M are #000.) However, Missingno. will not be allowed to battle nor will it function correctly in the photo section (where players can take pictures of Pokémon). The photos of it will not develop if taken.
In Pokémon Stadium 2 (USA), Missingno. and 'M will become Dittos, although when compared to Missingno.'s Ditto (which is completely pink like a normal Ditto), 'M's Ditto appears to have a strange shade of purple.