Missingno.

Misssingno. is an infamous video game glitch known to occur in the Pokemon Red and Blue games for Nintendo's handheld video game console, the Nintendo Game Boy. Missingno. is a pokemon that usually, but not always appears to be a "glitchy" or unorganized pixelated blob. It alternately appears as "M'Block", depending on unknown factors in each individual game.

Properties

Missingno. has four different possible sprites, one, "Glitch Form" is a pixelated block that may disrupt the game briefly before it appears, the Kabutops and Aerodactyl fossil appearing at the Pewter City Museum , and "Ghost Missingno.", appearing like the unidentified ghosts from the Vermilion city tower in the game before receiving the Silph. Scope.

MissingNo. has the types normal and bird displayed on its Stat page. This is strange due to the fact that a "Bird-Type" Pokemon does not exist but rather the bird-looking pokemon are called "Flying-Type". When caught, it has the base moves "water gun", another "water gun" and "sky attack" (An attack appearing twice is normally impossible). The effects of MissinngNo. are limited and do no severe damage to a game. If one is captured after defeating the Elite Four, it will scramble the visuals when you try to view your Hall of Fame record. Other than a few other graphic scrambles, this is the only permanent effect.

Reason for MissingNo.

Missingno is the Glitch Pokémon that appears after viewing the Old Man's tutorial in Viridian City on how to catch Pokémon, then immediately Flying to Cinnabar Island and Surfing along the right hand side of the island, near the Gym, until one is encountered.

When you talk to the old man in Viridian City, the game needs to change the player's name to "OLD MAN" so that it will display the "OLD MAN" sprite instead of the original character. Because of this, the programmers needed a place to store the player's information and name while the "OLD MAN" data replaced it, so they decided to store it in the area where wild Pokémon information is. This was done because of the lack of memory on an original Game Boy. This normally wouldn't cause any glitches because the correct data for wild Pokémon available is written to this area in memory whenever the player travels to an area where it is possible to catch wild Pokémon.

Cinnabar Island's coast has no data for indicating which wild Pokémon are available because no pokemon can be caught in the general area. The same is true for both Viridian City and Cinnabar Island itself. The game uses whatever data was already in the nearby area, or whatever area the player was in last, when determining which wild Pokémon are encountered and what their levels are. This is seen when exiting the Safari Zone and flying directly to a place with no available pokemon memory such as Cinnibar Island. When this is done, Safari Zone Pokemon can be encountered along the right side of the island because Cinnibar Island is using the Safari Zone's available Pokémon data.

Normally this memory space ,found on the side of Cinnibar Island, would hold the data of the last area visited where wild Pokémon were catchable and their level data. But since the player's last visited area had no Pokémon and instead the player's temporarily stored name (Viridian City), this leaves the game placing in the temporarily stored data in the available Pokémon data's place. This is what causes Missingno's. availability.

The name of the player has much to do with the level and appearance of MissingNo.. As stated earlier, MissingNo. appears due to a lack of Pokemon data in Cinnibar and the use of the player's info (which has been stored in the pokemon info data in Viridian City) inserted into this empty space. The type of Pokémon or MissingNo. the player encounters is determined by the characters used in the 3rd, 5th, and 7th characters of the player's name. The level of the Pokémon or MissingNo. is based on the 2nd, 4th, and 6th characters.

Nintendo's official response

Nintendo has publicly said very little about the Missingno. phenomenon, but several statements have been posted on nintendo.com, like this one from 2001:

"We are sorry to hear of the trouble you are having with your games. Although we don't have access to game tips in our e-mail department, I can tell you that the MissingNO Pokemon is a known glitch and is not a real part of the game. When players get MissingNO, their games can perform strangely and the graphics will often become scrambled. Note that we don't recommend doing any "tricks" that involve finding MissingNO."

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See Also

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