Experience With Pokémon Glitches?

[FlareTheBlitz]

I recently dove down the rabbit hole of the many, many glitches in the Pokémon series, and I wanted to share my experiences with them, and hear from you guys if you've messed around with glitches like this before!

A couple years ago, I started a casual playthrough of Pokémon Red, mainly just to see how the series began (I would recommend playing Fire Red/Leaf Green instead, the original games are held together by duct tape.and Elmer's glue). Eventually, I reached Cinnabar Island, and decided to have some fun. That's right, it was time to summon the abomination known as Missingno! I ended up catching quite a few, as well as Missingno's lesser known cousin, M', and all was right with the world.

Fast forward to earlier this year, I decided that I wanted to REPLAY Pokémon Red and Blue, and try to complete the Pokédex. I quickly found out that one of the 151 Pokémon in the Dex, Mew, was only accessible via glitches, without straight up cheating. This led me down the path of the Trainer-Fly glitch, when you fly away from a trainer AFTER they have already spotted you, leading the game to THINK you're in a battle, evesn though you can freely explore the overworld. With the glitch, I caught a Mew, and more notably, a Level 100 Gengar before I even reached Pewter City.

But even THAT wasn't enough for me. Last week, I went all in. It was time to break the fabric of Pokémon reality itself. It was time for arbitrary code execution.

To put it simply, arbitrary code execution, better known as "ACE," is when you glitch the game SO BAD that you can just write code WITHIN THE GAME ITSELF and have the game run it. Doing some sort of weird ritual which involves getting 255 glitch Pokémon in your party, switching around items and tossing Master Balls and TMs in a VERY specific way, you can get an item known simply as "4F". When you use this item, a nickname screen will show up, and by entering specific nicknames, you can do literally ANYTHING you want. Do you want infinite Master Balls and Rare Candies? Done. How about changing a Pokémon's nickname, EVs and IVs, species, or even whether the Pokémon is shiny or not? Easy. And the list goes on (If you wanna learn more about this dark magic, check out the Glitch City Wiki! They have a TON of info about ACE and TONS of other Pokémon glitches).

(Side note, think about how absurd this process would be in the actual Pokémon world to an outside observer. Your son just turned 10 years old, and is about to start their Pokémon journey. They exit your house, then walk straight back in. Suddenly, they start digging through their item pouch, which is supposed to be empty, but now acts like a Bag of Holding. They pull out 249 Master Balls out of thin air, throw them on the ground, then leave like nothing just happened.)

Alrighty, that's enough about me and my knowledge of the dark arts. How about you guys? Do you guys ever mess around with glitches?

 

[Mirage]

My first game that I actually understood anything that was going on was Pokemon Emerald, by which point there weren't very many easy glitches left, but there was one that was still pretty accessible. If you turned off the GBA in a specific place in Emerald while saving the game (I thiiiiiink it was the Battle Tower?), you'd actually be able to clone a Pokemon, as well as its item too! Not as game breaking as what Gen 1 had, but you could still get unlimited Master Balls and multiple of each legend if you wanted, albeit much more slowly.

Ironically, other than that, probably my other main experience was with launch day Scarlet and Violet. SO many janky glitches - if anyone reading this never got to play Scarlet and Violet early in its life, you owe it to yourself to watch one of the glitch compilations from the era, something like this one. They were epic

 

[CuteBunnyGirl]

When I played gen 1, I used the pokedoll glitch and the X accuracy glitch in my playthrough.

The pokedoll glitch lets you run from the ghost Marowak without a Silph Scope by using a pokedoll at it and the X accuracy glitch makes every move 100% accurate if you use an X accuracy. (yes, that includes 1 hit KO moves)

 

[FlareTheBlitz]

If you turned off the GBA in a specific place in Emerald while saving the game (I thiiiiiink it was the Battle Tower?), you'd actually be able to clone a Pokemon, as well as its item too!

Yep, the Battle Tower cloning glitch (the fact that I know what glitch you're talking about immediately shows how broken my brain is from all these glitches). Basically, when you shut off your console at that specific time, the Pokémon in your party ARE saved, but the Pokémon in your boxes are NOT saved. ONLY in the Battle Tower (I'm 99% sure), you can abuse this to clone Pokémon.

When I played gen 1, I used the pokedoll glitch and the X accuracy glitch in my playthrough.

Ah yes, The Pokédoll glitch. It's such a simple glitch, but is VERY useful, especially in speedruns (that's an actual speedrun strat lol). I didn't know about the X Accuracy glitch though, that's absurd! Does the X Accuracy glitch still fail with the 1 in 256 glitch? (A glitch where moves with 100% accuracy have a 1/256 chance to miss due to one bad line of code)

 

[LutherAmarine]

Man, sometimes I wonder how people even found out about some glitches back in the day, before data mining became a very noticed thing. Like you mean to tell me that somebody out there decided to watch the Old Man catch a Pokemon then immediately fly to Cinnabar Island to surf up and down on the coast?

...Actually, I'm willing to believe that. So how about the Trainer-Fly glitch? Especially to obtain a Mew from it.

So somebody flew away from a long range trainer, went to Cerulean City, then just happened to fight a random Youngster with a Slowpoke, then fly back to Lavender Town, then walked to the western exit to summon a Mew? THAT feels so oddly specific 'w';

 

[SparklingBlue]

I seem to remember seeing the MissingNo glitch mentioned in a strategy guide or a magazine, but never really attempted the Mew glitch (also mentioned in a magazine.)

 

[FlareTheBlitz]

So how about the Trainer-Fly glitch? Especially to obtain a Mew from it.

So somebody flew away from a long range trainer, went to Cerulean City, then just happened to fight a random Youngster with a Slowpoke, then fly back to Lavender Town, then walked to the western exit to summon a Mew? THAT feels so oddly specific 'w';

I decided to look into the discovery of the Trainer Fly glitch, and found this document:
IMAKUNI Pokemon Yellow Glitch Document

According to the document, IMAKUNI discovered this glitch on December 13th of 2003, which is only FOUR YEARS after Pokémon Yellow's release in North America. In the Intro Section, they mention that they found the algorithm in which the glitchy 'mons are generated.

As a side note, this document is INSANELY in-depth, and 100% accurate for a document from 2004. It has the Special Stats that generate Pokémon for EVERY possible value (from 0-255). This INCLUDES glitch Pokémon and glitch trainers (yeah, for some reason you can encounter glitch trainers with this glitch).

The author also explains in detail for the glitch works, mentioning how this glitch replaces a specific spot in memory with the Special Stat data of your last encountered Pokémon. So my theory is that the emulator they were using (VisualBoyAdvance) had some sort of memory viewer where they could analyze memory values and reverse-engineer it from there.

Anyway, sorry about geeking out, these glitches have anyways been really interesting to me

 

[StellarWind]

I haven't done too much glitch exploring myself, I think I've only triggered two of them on purpose, mostly to see if they actually work.

The first was fairly obscure at the time – this was many years ago, before the English version of Gold/Silver was released, and I was playing a fan translation of the JP version. I stumbled upon a guide to the glitch (nowadays known as the "Bug-Catching Contest glitch") which did not quite get into technical details of what it does, only that it can create shiny versions of any Pokémon provided that the Pokémon in question can evolve, as evolution stabilizes (mostly) the result of the glitch in question. At that point I was bored enough to give it a whirl using an Eevee (it was the easiest thing to quickly evolve!), and I recall being rather surprised at the time to see that yes, I now had a purple Vaporeon... with some rather unusual moves (including Dragon Rage of all things!). Then I realized that it wasn't just the "shiny" status that it yoinked from the Red Gyarados, but also the moves etc. it had at the time, and gods know what else. It was very much an interesting little curio, but I haven't really used the resultant 'mon much and then the English versions surfaced and I haven't really hecked around with that fan translation since.

The only other glitch I triggered on purpose was the trainer-fly glitch in gen 1 for the purpose of obtaining Mew – and I think by that point it was already well-documented, or at the very least recently discovered but with a very good explanation of how exactly it works. I read about other glitches, of course, and even from the perspective of someone who isn't really programming-savvy, they're fascinating bastards – but I think I'll leave the joy of using 8F arbitrary code execution to make Pokemon Blue run Pong (or similar feats of lunacy) to entities much crazier than me. xD

 

[FlareTheBlitz]

this was many years ago, before the English version of Gold/Silver was released, and I was playing a fan translation of the JP version.

Do you have any more information about this fan translation? This is INSANELY interesting to me, a fan translation for a game from 2000 is crazy, I didn't know fan translations were even a thing in 2000!

I stumbled upon a guide to the glitch (nowadays known as the "Bug-Catching Contest glitch") which did not quite get into technical details of what it does, only that it can create shiny versions of any Pokémon provided that the Pokémon in question can evolve, as evolution stabilizes (mostly) the result of the glitch in question.

I'll be honest, I hadn't heard of this glitch before, so this was all brand new information to me. It's probably because this glitch was exclusive to the Japanese versions of Gold and Silver, and is not possible on any other language.

And yeah, what you say is true: it merges the data from the second and sixth Pokémon in your party. It does mention that this new "hybrid" Pokémon can be stabilized by evolving the hybrid 'mon.

What's even more odd to me is that this glitch requires a specific day set on the game (It has to be a Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday when you first perform the glitch). What's even MORE strange? You have to wait TWO WHOLE DAYS to complete the glitch. I dunno, needing to wait two REAL WORLD days JUST to do a glitch. Like, really??

(One last thing. If you don't have a Pokémon in your sixth party slot and perform this glitch, you can get a glitch Pokémon called "?????", which opens the door to a bunch of other glitches, like getting Celebi Eggs and Shiny Celebis, getting Glitch Unown, and duplicating Key Items. Which obvious makes you wonder... who the heck discovered this???)

but I think I'll leave the joy of using 8F arbitrary code execution to make Pokemon Blue run Pong (or similar feats of lunacy) to entities much crazier than me. xD

Don't forget about that TAS that used arbitrary code execution to beat the game... after playing the ENTIRETY of the Bad Apple music video (INCLUDING the song, ALL of it running on the Gameboy Color)! Pokemon Crystal Bad Apple TAS

Oh, and don't forget this classic, that I'm still not entirely convinced isn't black magic: Pokemon Yellow ACE TAS

As a side note, ACE in Pokémon games are stupidly interesting to me. It's literally having a GameShark to do whatever you want, but WITHOUT a GameShark. The reasons that it work are bonkers, considering that your tricking the game into WRITING CUSTOM CODE. As of now, arbitrary code execution is possible in the Generation 1-4 games. Glitch City Wiki also mentions that ACE was a thing in Pokémon ORAS, but not the one you'd expect. Apparently, this form of ACE in ORAS was used to, get this, INSTALL HOMEBREW ON YOUR 3DS. It's nuts.

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Something about Pokémon glitches make me super excited. It's like science, taking something apart and trying to figure out how it works. It's like a puzzle game, but the solution is different depending on the player. It's REALLY fun and cool to perform these glitches and discover things about the game you were never supposed to see. Like being a Pokémon professor, but with forbidden knowledge.

If you haven't tried glitches in Pokémon games, I HIGHLY recommend giving it a shot. Obviously not on your childhood save, but load up the games on an emulator and give it a shot. You can find Pokémon game ROMs online, but I can't tell you where to get them. The Nintendo Ninjas already know where I live, and I can't risk it. But if you're interested in being a glitch researcher, read on!

Using official hardware for glitches, while possible, is not recommended. Messing with some of these glitches can corrupt your save file and force you to start over from the very beginning. Believe me, this gets frustrating REALLY quickly! So using an emulator is a million times better. You can create save states, take screenshots and videos, and even open a memory viewer to see exactly what the heck is going on!

For the Gameboy era of games (AKA the Generation 1-3 games), I recommend the mGBA emulator with GBA BIOS files installed. Again, I can't tell you where to get these files, but they ARE very important! Without the BIOS files installed, arbitrary code execution will have issues being recreated, so make you get those BIOS files!

I will admit I'm not as familiar with glitches for the DS Pokémon games, as the DS line of games don't have NEARLY as many glitches compared to the Gameboy line. However, for the DS line of games, I typically use the melonDS emulator. Again, if possible, install the DS BIOS files into melonDS for emulation accuracy. Without the BIOS files, glitches can act a bit funky.

It's time for the list of glitch resources™! The biggest repository of Pokémon glitches is at the Glitch City Wiki website. Seriously, this website has basically EVERY glitch ever documents in the Pokémon games, for every game and even spinoffs. It even has guides and explainations for how glitches work, as well as database useful for glitching. If you're interestes in arbitrary code execution though, the YouTuber Papa Jefé has guides for ACE setups in Pokémon Emerald and Fire Red/Leaf Green. Give him a watch, his videos are dope!

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In conclusion, Pokémon glitches are sick, and I wish EVERYONE would explore the wacky world that glitches unlock. So get out there and break your childhood Pokémon games!

 

[StellarWind]

Fan translations have been around since the early 90s, even before Pokémon became a thing! That said, early Pokémon rom hacks, fan translations and the like were not nearly as elaborate as they get these days and were often heavily restricted by character limits and the like, which tended to result in some very questionable translations for the most part often put together by bootleggers (there are a few infamous examples, like that version of Gold that refers to Furret as a 'Worm' Pokémon, or the by this point absolutely legendary 'Vietnamese Crystal' version, but that's neither here nor there). The version I played, in particular, wasn't a bootlegging effort – it was a translation of Silver done by someone who called themselves "Vida Translations", and I remember it being not as wonky as some of its contemporaries.

... and thinking of crimes against old Pokémon ROMs just reminded me of other hacks from the time, like the one that tried to edit Link's Awakening DX into something Pokémon adjacent (swapping Link for Red, the master sword for Bulbasaur, and mentions of the Wind Fish for Celebi for one – I think the person behind this wanted to eventually make it into a whole total conversion but fell off the project) or the relative short proof-of-concept that involved a lot of map and dialogue editing, even some item editing (rather big for the time where pokemon hacks were fairly experimental) and was called, I kid you not, The World Famous Talking Cactus. That particular phrase will stay with me for several incarnations, I think...

Either way neither of these are particularly on-topic since they're deliberate edits and not glitches. That Crystal Bad Apple injection is still ridiculously impressive, though xD

 

[FlareTheBlitz]

or the by this point absolutely legendary 'Vietnamese Crystal' version

That Crystal Bad Apple injection is still ridiculously impressive, though xD

The fact that it takes all of that time to play Bad Apple in its entirety, then goes to the credits the second it ends is freakin' hilarious to me. The idea that you have to watch the whole Bad Apple video BEFORE beating the game is hysterical to me lol