From Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia.
An example of a glitch Pokémon
A glitch Pokémon is a Pokémon that exists in the games due to a programming or level design oversight, some and some not with characteristics derived from the game's default error handling capabilities for an invalid Pokémon, such as the name "Missingno." or "??????????". Another example of this is learn-set data for an Egg Generation IV, where it learns Splash as a starting move, likely to prevent the game freezing from an invalid attack from being used. As they were not intentionally placed inside the game by Nintendo or Game Freak, a few of them might be hazardous to saved data.
Catching a glitch Pokémon will sometimes cause Pokédex data to appear which may freeze the game. To avoid this, the player must have activated a specific flag, which will be either seeing a specific Pokémon or owning a specific Pokémon.
Obtainable glitch Pokémon
- Main article: List of glitch Pokémon
Trivia
- There are 39 Missingno. with identifiers in between real Pokémon, which would add up to 190 Pokémon.
- Interestingly, recent words from Shigeki Morimoto state that there were once 190 Pokémon planned for development in Pokémon Red and Green.[1]
- This may or not be a coincidence because the error handler MISSINGNO. is used for blank, or formatted Pokémon data. Many of its characteristics are either a translated 0 value (e.g. default Nidoran♂ cry with pitch 0), or blank data rolled over to the next logical values (e.g. base stats denoting the rosters of several burglars.)
References
