MissingNo.
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MissingNo. (Japanese: けつばん Ketsuban) is a Bird and Normal -type Glitch Pokémon. It is the best-known of all the Glitch Pokémon.
There have also been MissingNo.-like glitches in other Pokémon RPGs, which are even sometimes called a MissingNo.; however, these aren't related to the Red/Blue MissingNo., and are usually only obtainable with some sort of game enhancing device.
Encountering MissingNo. has been known to interfere with the save game data in various ways, such as adversely affecting the Hall of Fame saved data.
When a MissingNo. or other glitch Pokémon is viewed in Pokémon Stadium, it will appear as a baby Rhydon (the image used in the substitute attack). When viewed in Pokémon Stadium 2, Missingno, will show up as a Ditto, and if the game is then saved from Stadium 2, the Pokémon will be a Ditto permanently.
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-obtains items, such as the Rare Candy item. However, the duplication bug can affect any item in the game, not just Rare Candies.
Game data
Game locations
| Gen | Game | Rarity | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | Pokémon Red and Blue | Glitch | Rare Candy cheat, Mew glitch |
| Pokémon Yellow | Glitch | Mew glitch |
Base stats
| HP: | 33 | |
|---|---|---|
| Attack: | 137 | |
| Defense: | 1 | |
| Special: | 29 | |
| Speed: | 6 |
Since Missingno. does not exist in any game that uses the Special Attack and Special Defense stats, only its Special stat is listed.
Type effectiveness
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As the Bird type isn't weak, resistant, or immune to any type, MissingNo.'s secondary typing effectively does not affect its type advantages.
Learnset
By leveling up
| Generation I | ||
|---|---|---|
| Level | Move | Type |
| Start | Water Gun | 
|
| Water Gun |
| |
| Sky Attack | 
| |
By TM/HM
Details
- MissingNo. has the Pokédex number #000.
- Its attacks are Water Gun, Water Gun, and Sky Attack.
- Its cry varies between battle (short Nidoran♂'s cry) and its Stat screen (Rhydon's cry).
- Its types are Bird (not Flying, Bird may be a lost beta type) 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 in the sixth slot, especially rare items such as Rare Candies, Master Balls and hard to obtain TMs. You will get 128 of that item. If there is an HM or another item that you cannot throw away in that slot, you will still have many of that item.
- If MissingNo. is caught, it will not appear in the Pokédex (unless caught via the Mew Glitch BEFORE arriving at Cinnabar Island). This is because the bit of data that tells the game you captured Missingno. is the same as the data for battling a Cubone, and there are unavoidable trainers in Rock Tunnel who use Cubone. Because of this, there is no official Pokédex description for MissingNo.
- Sometimes, depending on your player name, Missingno. can appear as the usual glitch-box look, but will have a louder growling type cry thats not used in the game otherwise.
Missingno. can only be found in the wild in Pokémon Red and Blue due to a bug in the map design.
In the Yellow version of the game, MissingNo. can be caught via the Mew glitch (battle any channeler in the Pokémon Tower rather than the youngster with the Slowpoke. Remember that you cannot battle another Pokémon after you beat the channeler until the menu pops up). However, save before doing this. After the menu pops up and you push B, the screen will go black for a couple seconds and Missingno. will appear (it will be blocky). If MissingNo. does not appear after 15 seconds, reset the Gameboy and try it again. MissingNo. will be at level 7; however, if you are not experimenting with the game, it is recommended that you DO NOT catch it.
MissingNo. can also be traded into the Pokémon Yellow version of the game, but cannot be traded into Pokémon Gold and Silver, the sequels to Red, Blue, and Yellow. In Pokémon Yellow, MissingNo. levels down to level 1 and stays there permanently. Rare Candies will not work because when this Missingno. enters battle, after it gains experience points, it will revert to level 1.
When it is traded, MissingNo. appears as one of many different Pokémon from the Gold/Silver perspective, and when the player tries to trade MissingNo. a message appears that says "Your <name> appears abnormal" and the trade automatically cancels. However, there is a really rare case of it succesfully being traded and turning into to the Pokémon that it was said to be. If it does, and is attempted to be traded back a Generation I game while the players are still in the Time Capsule, it will turn back into a Missingno.
Why MissingNo. appears
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 until one is encountered, without visiting any other areas.
Whenever the game "sets up" the planned battle against the Old Man's 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, due to the lack of memory on a Game Boy. Normally this wouldn't cause any abnormal activity, as the correct data for the 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.
Along Cinnabar Island's coast, however, there is no data indicating which wild Pokémon are catchable, and the same is true for both Viridian City and Cinnabar Island itself, at least by movement in long grass. The game uses whatever data was already in the corresponding area of data when determining which wild Pokémon encountered and their levels-- now the player's name. Normally this space in memory would hold the data of the last area visited where wild Pokémon were catchable in grass and their level data (this same glitch allows players to exit the Safari Zone and Fly immediately to Cinnabar Island to be able to catch and fight Safari Zone Pokémon in the same way as they would in other areas), however, since in both Viridian City and Cinnabar Island the data is empty for Pokémon obtainable in the grass, the active data is never overwritten, leading to Missingno.'s. availability, among other things.
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. By knowing which letters and symbols match which breeds and numbers, through use of certain calculators and charts [1], it is possible to set your player name at the start of the game depending on which Pokémon you wish to find, and at which levels.
MissingNo. in Pokémon Yellow
When Pokémon Yellow was released, the original Missingno. and M glitches were disabled and 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 (see [2] for details). Doing method #3 of the Mew glitch using a Pokémon with a special stat of 31, 32, 61, 62, 63, 67, 68, 69, or 86 will cause Missingno. to appear. The Yellow version Missingno. is known to be more malicious than the Red/Blue Missingno., and frequently causes the game to freeze when it is found, though there is about a 1/32 chance that it won't freeze. It is recommended that the game not be saved after capturing it, because it can corrupt or delete the data.
MissingNo. in other generations
Generation II equivalent
There is no true Generation II equivalent to MissingNo., as Surfing up and down on the eastern shore of any location will come up with Pokémon available in that specific location. However, by using a cheating device or somehow messing with the game, players can encounter a Pokémon named ?????, which is also Pokédex number 000. The same Pokémon can be encountered by Gameshark's Steal Trainer Pokémon code. This Pokémon can transform to the last Pokémon you battled with. It will send you to Glitch City, and freeze the game.
Generation III equivalent
There is also no true equivalent to MissingNo. in Generation III. However, like in Generation II, there is some amount of data at index and National Pokédex #000, known as ??????????. It has no ability, knows no attacks, and has its data zeroed out on all of its stats. Because of this, it is virtually of no use to trainers. However, there is another glitch-encountered Pokémon: ?. All that ? is is filler for old Unown data, so it has its call. Its TM/HM compatibility is similar as well, as it can learn none. Unlike Unown, though, its only attack is Tackle, and its sprite is a beta sprite representing a Pokémon not yet seen in the Pokédex.
Generation IV equivalent
In Generation IV, there is a closer equivalent to the idea of MissingNo. that many have, which appears when a trainer enters a double battle with two fainted Pokémon, an egg, and one other Pokémon. Instead of the egg coming from a Poké Ball, however, a white rectangle with lines in it pops out and gives Bulbasaur's cry.[3] It also appears as a shining Pokémon for reasons unknown.
Forms
Missingno.'s most common appearance is as a box of pixels in a backwards 'L' shape that is similar to a Tetris piece. However, it sometimes appears as a Ghost from Lavender Tower looks before one receives the Silph Scope, or having the sprite of the Aerodactyl or Kabutops skeletons from Pewter City's museum. The different forms of MissingNo. are tied to different hexadecimal numbers, and which kinds appear depend on the letters in the player's name. [4]
Nintendo on MissingNo.
Nintendo has an official description of Missingno. listed in their Customer Service troubleshooting section[1]:
"MissingNO is a programming quirk, and not a real part of the game. When you get this, your game can perform strangely, and the graphics will often become scrambled. The MissingNO Pokémon is most often found after you perform the Flight Safari Zone Pokémon trick [or Viridian Old Man trick]. To fix the scrambled graphics, try releasing the MissingNO Pokémon"
Trivia
- MissingNo. has the highest Attack base stat of all Pokémon in Pokémon Red and Blue and the ninth highest out of all Pokémon. Likewise, it has the lowest Defense base stat of any Pokémon, and the third lowest Speed base stat, only losing to Shuckle and Munchlax whom each have a base Speed of 5 each.
- MissingNo. is the heaviest of all Pokémon, its weight surpassing even Groudon.
- Despite it being almost half of 'M's height, it is more than twice its weight.
- Before the truth about how MissingNo. exists was known, many fans speculated that it was a removed legendary Pokémon (Given its extremely low catch rate, one can see the reasoning behind this).
- In its pixel box form, it shares the exact same movepool as 'M, with two exceptions; It doesn't learn Pound, and can learn the TM for Substitute.
- A 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, of course, a player has six Pokémon at the time Missingno. is caught, MissingNo. will be sent to Bill's PC, just like any other Pokémon.) This rumor will only hold true, however, if the Pokémon in question is level 0 (It is impossible to encounter a MissingNo. at level 0). Therefore, it is possible to extract MissingNo. from Bill's PC without game malfunction.
- As mentioned before, if the Elite Four is defeated and the Hall of Fame option appears in the PC, seeing MissingNo. will cause very distorted characters, glitched names and completely different Pokémon to show up instead of your Pokémon who have beaten the Elite Four. The Hall of Fame is the only extremely noticeable change after seeing MissingNo.
- Though MissingNo. cannot usually be traded into Generation II, it will appear to be a G/S/C Pokémon such as Remoraid or Stantler on the trade screen for Gold/Silver/Crystal, depending on its index number.
- Rumors are still plentiful that capturing MissingNo. can cause permanant damage to your game, possibly even erasing the save files, when in fact, the Hall of Fame glitching is the only permanent side effect, rendering MissingNo. (relatively) safe to capture and train.
References
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This glitch Pokémon article is part of Project GlitchDex, a Bulbapedia project that aims to write comprehensive articles on glitches in the Pokémon games. |
