MissingNo.: The Most Famous Glitch in Pokémon History

MissingNo. (short for Missing Number) is without a doubt the most famous glitch ever found in a Pokémon game. It appeared in Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue on the Game Boy in 1996, and became a legend almost instantly among fans.

How to find MissingNo. in Pokémon Red/Blue

The bug was easy to reproduce: talk to the Old Man in Viridian City, fast-travel to Cinnabar Island, then Surf east along the coast. A Pokémon over Level 100 would appear — and it wasn't a normal Pokémon.

Raticate, one of the Pokémon that sometimes appeared alongside MissingNo

On screen, the sprite showed up as a tower of distorted pixels, reversed letters, and random colored blocks. Catching it worked — but with a super interesting side effect.

Why did MissingNo. duplicate your 6th item?

The glitch's biggest secret: every time a player encountered MissingNo., the 6th item in the bag was duplicated 128 times. Many kids worldwide put Rare Candy or Master Ball in the 6th slot, ran into MissingNo., and came back to the Elite Four with an arsenal impossible to gather any other way.

Technically, MissingNo. isn't a real Pokémon — it's an empty slot in the game's species table. When the game tries to load data for that entry, it reads memory from other places and assembles a very weird visual Frankenstein.

MissingNo. was based on Rhydon

Rhydon, whose sprite was the fallback base for MissingNo

A little-known fact: the programmers used Rhydon as the default Pokémon in the game engine. Whenever data was missing or empty, the game tried to render Rhydon as a fallback. That's why many MissingNo. glitches show bits of Rhydon mixed with distorted pixels.

Did MissingNo. crash your Game Boy?

Nintendo issued official warnings in 1999 telling players not to catch MissingNo. because it could mess up the save file. In practice, the worst that could happen was scrambling the Hall of Fame and Pokédex — but the "broke my Game Boy" myth spread through schools and became a fun playground story.

MissingNo. in pop culture

MissingNo. inspired thousands of YouTube videos with billions of views, official Nintendo shirts, and even a subtle reference in Pokémon Sun & Moon — in the naming of a disguised Ditto.

Is there a Pokémon TCG card of MissingNo.?

Officially, there is no MissingNo. card in the Pokémon TCG. But the community has produced countless custom cards on forums — some with considerable value among curio collectors. At PokeCardsClub you can track real rare cards and check live prices.