MissingNo.

1999video game glitchclassic

Published September 24, 2026

MissingNo. is a glitch Pokémon that appears in the original Pokémon Red and Blue when the game tries to load data for a nonexistent species. Nintendo Power documented it in May 1999 and warned players away, but the glitch spread anyway once gamers realized catching it could duplicate items. It grew into one of gaming's well-known Easter eggs and a shorthand for programming glitches in retro gaming culture.

pokemongamingnintendo memes4chan memesearly internet memes

Overview

The glitch takes multiple visual forms. Its default sprite is a backward L-shape of scrambled pixels representing a Normal/Bird-type Pokémon in Red and Blue and a Normal/999-type in Yellow, and the game also generates variant appearances including Kabutops Fossil, Aerodactyl Fossil, Ghost, and Yellow forms depending on which corrupted slot loads2. Encountering the creature produces graphical errors on the Hall of Fame screen and can freeze the game in edge cases1.

The meme angle came from the side effect of catching MissingNo. rather than the creature itself. The encounter multiplies items in the player's bag by many copies, letting trainers stockpile rare items like Rare Candies and Master Balls3. Outside Pokémon, "MissingNo." grew into internet shorthand for any glitched or missing entity, showing up in Minecraft splash text and elsewhere online4.

Origin & Background

Platform
Pokémon Red and Blue / Nintendo Power (viral spread)
Date
1999

Game Freak's programmers reserved 256 data slots for Pokémon in the original Game Boy engine but only defined 151 real species, leaving 105 slots that the game reads as glitch Pokémon1. The classic encounter method combines two programming oversights. The water strip east of Cinnabar Island was flagged as a valid wild-encounter zone but never assigned a species table, so the game reads whatever encounter data was last cached1. Speaking to the Old Man in Viridian City, who demonstrates catching a Weedle, overwrites that cache with data derived from the player's name, which then maps to high-level glitch encounters when the player surfs on Cinnabar's east coast1. Nintendo Power documented the trick in its May 1999 issue and called it a "programming quirk"3.

How It Spread

News about the encounter spread through gaming magazines and player guides despite Nintendo's warning that a full game reset might be needed to clear the graphical damage, and some players even charged up to $200 for capture tips3. Fan glitch archives catalogued MissingNo.'s variant forms alongside related Kanto-region glitches like the Old Man Glitch and the Mew Glitch2.

The name spread beyond gaming too. On 4chan's /b/ board, the word "moot" auto-filters to "missingno" as an in-joke about founder Christopher Poole, so "smooth" renders as "smissingnoh"4. The nickname also became the standard label for any unnamed or corrupted data in gaming discussions online1.

How to Use This Meme

To trigger MissingNo. in Pokémon Red or Blue, players typically talk to the Old Man in Viridian City and watch his Weedle-catching demonstration, then fly to Cinnabar Island and surf along the east coast water strip1. The player's name determines which glitch entry loads, so different trainers see different level ranges and forms1. Catching or defeating the encounter multiplies items in the player's inventory, which is why the trick spread as a duplication exploit for rare items1.

Frequently Asked Questions