by Jack DeVries

Welcome to the Pokemon Report, the leading cause of monster battling nostalgia among teens and young adults.

Your host, Jack, is a Rayquaza on the inside.

It's inevitable. I've been writing about Pokemon for weeks and the kid in me is demanding to be released. I went to scrounge up the old Game Boy titles to relive the good old days, but all I could find was Pokemon Yellow and Pokemon Crystal. Both good games, to be sure, but they are missing crucial elements that made their original counterparts awesome.

The glitches.

Both Red and Blue as well as Gold and Silver had some pretty heinous glitches. And while some corrupted your save file or destroyed your Pokedex, there were others that had some pretty cool side effects.

I'm not going to go into the step by step instructions for how to complete these overcomplicated procedures (if you're a real fan you already know them by heart).
I will however do a lot of reminiscing, and if there's time, some full on trips down memory lane. Oh, and if you're too young to remember the Pokemon games that were out a decade ago then you make me feel old and we can't talk to each other.



Old Man Glitch featuring Missingno
Original Appearance: Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue
The effect: Holy crap what is that thing?! Oh hey my rare candies got duplicated!

Where my old school players at? I know you remember Missingno. It really says something about Pokemon fans that they took what is a potentially game ruining glitch and used it as a shortcut to level up their Pokemon. For the first few months we were all about battling and leveling up, but once somebody shouts "Hey there's a convoluted way to duplicate rare candies!" we all abandon our ethics and haul tail to Cinnabar Island.

So what the crap was the deal with this glitch? Why did this abomination of static and pixels come down from on high and bless us by duplicating items? It all comes down to that damn Old Man in Viridian City. In addition to be a terrible teacher, he also messes everything up. Due to the memory limitations of the Game Boy cartridge, the game has to move the data reserved for displaying your character's name to make room for "OLD MAN" to appear in the tutorial. Normally everything gets reset when you go anywhere with wild Pokemon (so as soon as you step outside of any town, or fish anywhere). For whatever reason, the coast of Cinnabar Island is like some Pokemon Phantom Zone and it has no wild Pokemon data. Blah blah blah, number values, blah blah blah. Long story short, the game freaks out and starts a battle with a Pokemon with a missing number value.

The side effect of battling this inside out error of a Pokemon is that the game assigns a number value to the 6th item in your bag, making 128 copies of it. If you caught Missingno you got even more of that item, but the result was like taking a hit or two of Poke-acid. Buildings could mess up and things generally went a little crazy until you got rid of the guy. His presence never full went away though since Missingno turned your Hall of Fame into a fool's gallery, with garbled sprites and random Pokemon. That's what you get, cheaters.

I'm not going to lie and say I never did this. You can bet your butt I duplicated rare candies and proteins and anything else that could help me out. I don't have time to legitimately train a Mewtwo, okay?! Don't judge me, I was young and foolish and my friend was talking smack. He needed to be brought down a peg. Him and his stupid Arcanine.



Mew Glitch
Original Appearance: Pokemon Red and Blue
The effect: You can finally get your Mew and stop whining about missing that Nintendo Event mall tour.

You know what makes this glitch awesome? That nobody discovered it until 2003. So while most of us were already playing Ruby and Sapphire, there were still people out there tinkering with the original game, figuring out how to make the limited memory of the Game Boy cartridge falter and give them what they wanted (kind of like telling your Alzheimer's-suffering grandmother that it's your birthday every week). I tried to track down who originally found this glitch, but it's not entirely known. Generally the credit is given to some guy that goes by TheSythe over on GameFAQs, but even he claims he found the glitch somewhere else. It's a mystery for the ages!

There are a few ways to get Mew using this trick, but the basics are the same. They all involve walking into the view of a trainer so he sees you, then flying or teleporting away like a dirty, frightened coward. Doing this messes up some of the assigned number values in the game's memory and if it's done right you can trick the game into thinking you're about to battle a wild Mew.

And what can you do with that Mew? Well, nothing because Pokemon Red and Blue are obsolete now and you can't trade him to any current Pokemon title. But if you're feeling nostalgic and wanted to play the original games this is currently the only way to get Mew on Red and Blue without a GameShark.



The Mysterious Truck
Original Appearance: Pokemon Red and Blue
The effect: Nothing, you've been had! Bamboozled! Hoodwinked, I say!

Okay so this one isn't a glitch per say, but it's in here because it caused a ruckus among the Poke-kids. For an unknown reason there is a small dock off screen past the S.S. Anne. If the player surfs over to the right of the screen they find a dock with a truck just sitting there. Surely this mysterious truck holds secrets! We better push it with Strength.

To even get to the dock players had to trade with a friend to get a Pokemon with Cut so they could bypass the entire S.S. Anne plot and continue on the game. Then they had to come back after they acquired Surf and Strength, which is nearly the end of the main plot. It required planning and foresight, and the promise to trade the Mew to your friend because you're totally sure that's what's under the truck.

And after playing through most of the game and backtracking you find out that the truck cannot be pushed with Strength. But wait, your friend said he knew a guy that did it and it worked! This was in 1998 people. There weren't huge Pokemon forum communities that could discredit these rumors the instant they popped up. So we were all left stumped as to how everybody's friend (you don't know him, he goes to another school) had one we didn't.

This went on for months. I knew guys that would swear on their lives that this was the way to get Mew and we were just doing it wrong. It still seems odd that there was a unique sprite for a vehicle way over there that had no purpose. It's even there in the remakes Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen.

Stupid truck.



Celebi Egg Trick
Original Appearance: Pokemon Silver and Pokemon Gold
The effect: You get the adorable little Celebi, and a crapton of cloned Sentrets.

Pokemon Silver and Gold are awesome for a bunch of reasons. The single most important of these being that Furret is the greatest Pokemon to ever grace the planet. Don't try and argue with me, I have a sword. One of the other reasons was that Gold and Silver featured the easiest way to clone Pokemon and items by turning the game off while it was switching PC boxes. It was way easier, and far less dangerous than yanking out the link cables during a trade. It did have a side effect of creating reject clones, but even those came in handy for what is commonly referred to as the Celebi egg trick.

The Celebi trick was interesting because it made use of the Pokemon egg which was a completely new feature for Gold and Silver. Breeding some Sneasels, tricking the Day Care man to raise one of the bad clones Pokemon, and some fiddling with the PC and bam! You got yourself an egg with a Celebi.

Just like the glitch tricks from previous titles it all came down to assigned number values in the memory. Instead of player names and item slots it was Pokemon moves. The trick could be used to get any Pokemon (like Mew), but since Celebi was the uncatchable legendary that was in vogue the trick was named after it.

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