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MissingNo is a pretty famous glitch Pokemon from the first generation.

Has MissingNo ever been acknowledged by the Pokemon company or Nintendo in any form? Such as a wink to it, a reference in an official guide, or cameo reference?

Valorum
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TheAsh
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3 Answers3

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It was acknowledged by Nintendo as a programming glitch.

"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 Fight Safari Zone Pokémon trick.

To fix the scrambled graphics, try releasing the MissingNo Pokémon. If the problem persists, the only solution is to re-start your game. This means erasing your current game and starting a brand new one."

Nintendo Customer Service - Pokémon.

It hasn't been mentioned by them since, but a franchise concept artist did include it on his Twitter feed

enter image description here

Valorum
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In some Pokémon games, they thought ahead and decided to implement a placeholder Pokémon named ?????????? (ten question marks), in order to prevent something like that from happening again.

It might not be MissingNo itself, but I guess it means they acknowledged the possibility that players will find MissingNo again in future games.

They went as far as giving it animations and a fake Pokédex entry:

A Pokédex entry for the placeholder question mark Pokémon. It is N°000, has a height of 0'00" and its weight is 0 lbs. The description says: "This is a newly discovered Pokémon. It is currently under investigation. No detailed information is available at this time."

The same question mark Pokémon, as it can be seen from the list of Pokémons you currently carry. It appears as a sprite of a jumping question mark, which is displayed at a 45 degrees perspective angle, making it look like a 3D question mark, and it's inside a grey oval shape. It seems to be level 0, has 10 hp and is carrying an item.

The animation of the question mark "jumping" up and down.

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They have actually acknowledged it involving the release of Red and Blue on Virtual Console, where they warned players that it may corrupt save data

Of course, this isn't something that Missingno can do and many believe this message was written to discourage people from abusing the item duplicating properties of Missingno. Missingno is actually rather benign compared to other glitch Pokemon, actually. It just screws with graphics and hall of fame data.

I just find glitch Pokemon super interesting in how they screw with the game, despite just being garbage filler data, and there's a lot of good YouTube videos covering various glitch Pokemon and their behaviors.

Edit: I guess the hall of fame data IS part of your save file, but it's not a critical part. People act like it will corrupt your entire save, but frankly that's just not the case. The only things it screws with are hall of fame data and sprites, the former of which is normal for a majority of glitch Pokemon anyway. Read the description in the video I linked and it explains it better.

Sources:

https://kotaku.com/how-to-do-the-missingno-glitch-in-pokemon-red-and-blue-1761583087 https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/MissingNo.

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    "They have actually acknowledged it involving the release of Red and Blue on Virtual Console, where they warned players that it may corrupt save data" Where did Nintendo issue this warning, and can you provide a direct quote? – LogicDictates Mar 18 '24 at 15:37
  • I'll send it when I find it, I'm stuck on a dumb school laptop because my phone's dead and I don't have a charger cord for it on me. – Eevee Mar 18 '24 at 15:41
  • Oops, I think I misread a quote somewhere. Sorry about that, I was thinking of the statement issued by Nintendo regarding MissingNo's impact on sprites. – Eevee Mar 18 '24 at 15:46
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    Duplicated items are a form of corrupted save data. – user253751 Mar 18 '24 at 17:17
  • Hall of Fame data is stored in the save file, so Nintendo was not wrong in their quote that it "may corrupt save data". Note that MissingNo can also cause soft-locks and other issues when caught, stored, retrieved, or used in battle. Especially the 'M (00) variant – Robotnik Mar 20 '24 at 04:41
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  • MissingNo. is regularly confused with 'M which can corrupt your save data if you catch it (and not just the Hall of Fame). They were two different incarnations of the same glitch. – Izkata Mar 20 '24 at 21:33