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Origin[]

MissingNo. ([Japanese: けつばん, Hepburn: Ketsuban) is a glitch Pokémon and an unofficial Pokémon species found in the video games Pokémon Red and Blue including Green and Yellow a that is short for "Missing Number". MissingNo. Pokémon are used as error handlers by game developer Game Freak; they appear when the game tries to access data for a Pokémon that does not exist. First documented by Nintendo in the May 1999 issue of Nintendo Power, encountering MissingNo. results in messed up graphics and item duplication of the player's sixth item in their inventory. . Due to the programming of certain in-game events, players can encounter MissingNo. via a glitch. It is one of the most famous video game glitches of all time. Encountering MissingNo. causes graphical anomalies and changes gameplay by increasing the number of items in the sixth entry of the player's Inventory by 128.

It has a sprite that is a strange block of glitched pixels in a backward-L shape. Due to the larger number of characters that can be used to make it appear, it is the most common form. Normal form is exclusive to Pokémon Red and Blue.

There are two reasons why the player encounters MissingNo., both as a result of programming bugs. The first is caused by the way the game stores battle information and the second is caused by the Old Man script in Viridian City. When traveling from one area to another, the game assigns numbers for Pokémon that the player encounters to a data buffer, read by the game when they encounter a wild Pokémon. However, on the right side of the Cinnabar and Seafoam Islands, no data is actually assigned to this buffer, and the information from the previous location is used instead (the player's name data).

Once encountered, players can fight, flee, or capture MissingNo. just like any other wild Pokémon in the game. After encountering the MissingNo., the sixth item's quantity in the player's item menu will be multiplied by 128, and the game's "Hall of Fame" gallery might become damaged forever. Other display problems may happen, though these can be fixed by viewing a Pokédex entry or resetting the Game Boy. It commonly appears as a scrambled "d" shaped rectangle, though sometimes (encounter values) it will look like a Ghost or two fossils.

Copyright[]

  • Data-generated content that is glitched cannot be copyrighted making MissingNo. Open Source. Despite this, Pokémon Red & Blue and other subsequent games remain under copyright and MissingNo cannot be marketed with the name of Pokemon or associated with GameFreak.

See Also[]

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