The Strongest Glitch Pokemon in Red and Blue, Ranked by Actual Stats

By Christopher Robert Fox · July 2026 · Every stat and moveset here was pulled straight from the ROM, not copied off a wiki

Could MissingNo. dominate competitive Pokemon today?

No, not really. But after going through every single glitch Pokemon in Generation 1, I may have found some worthy contenders. Out of the 105 potential glitch Pokemon in Red and Blue, I found the strongest ones that you can actually use in battle without your game exploding, and spoiler alert, some of these blow Mewtwo out of Cerulean Cave.

So some quick background for anyone who does not know how all this works. Every Pokemon in Generation 1 is stored as a number between 0 and 255. However, since there are only 151 real Pokemon, when the game tries to load a number that a real Pokemon with real data is not attached to, it goes to that spot in the memory and reads whatever it finds there as if it actually were a Pokemon. It pulls all this junk data into all the places where a Pokemon should be generated on screen, and what you get is a glitch Pokemon built out of whatever code was available.

Now there are actually two kinds of glitch Pokemon. Some of them are hybrids. They read a real Pokemon's base stats and typing but get a completely different moveset from glitch data. So you end up with something like a Tentacruel that can learn Thunderbolt, or a Jolteon that learns Hydro Pump. Those are cool, but they are still just real Pokemon with illegal moves. The ones I am interested in are the ones where the stats themselves come from garbage data, where the game is reading random code and interpreting it as HP, Attack, Defense, Speed, and Special. Because those are the ones that end up with stat lines that should not exist.

The problem is that most of the really strong ones crash your game. Their sprite data points to garbage memory and the Game Boy just gives up trying to render them. So out of 105 glitch Pokemon, most are either hybrids of existing Pokemon, too weak to matter, or too unstable to actually use. We are going to look at the ones that thread that needle, the ones with genuinely unique stats that are also stable enough to take into battle.

But do not worry, we are not completely skipping over the unstable ones. They will get their own section, I am calling them the Nukes, because some of them are technically the strongest Pokemon in Gen 1. They just happen to destroy everything around them, including your save file.

So I compared all of them, looked at their base stats, what moves they can learn, what TMs work on them, how difficult they are to obtain, and most importantly whether or not they crash your game when you try to use them. Without further ado, we start with number four.

Number 4

F0 index 240

Starting us off at number four we have this thing. Yeah, I am not going to try to pronounce that. Its index number is 240, so I am just going to call it F0.

F0 is a Fighting type, and the first thing you need to know about it is that it has a 182 base Attack. To put that into a little bit of perspective, Kartana, which currently has the highest Attack of any non-Mega Pokemon in the entire franchise, has 181. F0 beats it by one point.

Usually with a base stat like that you would expect there to be some kind of downside, and there definitely is. Its base Speed is 2. That is genuinely the lowest Speed stat I have ever seen on anything. So you have this Pokemon that hits harder than basically everything in the franchise, but it moves last every single time.

Without Trick Room being in Gen 1, the best way I can find to get around this is Thunder Wave. Paralyze whatever is in front of you and Speed stops mattering. From there you swing with Double-Edge, which is 120 base power coming off that 182 Attack, and it deletes almost anything it touches. The recoil hurts, sure, but that is exactly what the Softboiled is for. You heal the recoil right back, tank the next hit, and keep swinging. When you can heal off your own recoil, that recoil is basically free.

The reason it is only number four though is that 32 base Defense means it can get bodied pretty quickly at the start of a battle. If you cannot get that Thunder Wave off on the first turn, you might just go down before you get to do anything. But if you get past that first hurdle, this thing hits unbelievably hard. Highest Attack of any glitch Pokemon, and arguably the highest base Attack in non-Mega Pokemon history.

Number 3

F4 index 244

Number three is another one I cannot pronounce, index 244, calling it F4. And this one is kind of the opposite problem from F0.

F4 has a base Speed of 169. That makes it the third fastest Pokemon to ever exist, behind only Regieleki at 200 and Deoxys Speed Forme at 180. Both of those were not introduced until way later though. Deoxys came in Gen 3, Regieleki in Gen 8. Back when this thing was created in Gen 1, the fastest real Pokemon was Electrode at 150. F4 blows that away. It would have been the fastest Pokemon in existence for the entirety of Gen 1 and Gen 2.

Its base Attack is 0 though, so while it does technically have an Attack stat, it is not really hurting anybody with physical moves. You are working entirely off its Special, which is 106. For Gen 1 that is pretty solid, since Special covers both offense and defense. It is not Mewtwo levels, but it is definitely workable.

The set is straightforward special coverage. Psychic is your main move, and Psychic is kind of broken in Gen 1 since almost nothing resists it. Then you round it out with Ice Beam, Fire Blast, and Thunder so you have an answer for most things. If you would rather trade a little accuracy for more power, Blizzard is also legal here, and in Gen 1 Blizzard is 90 percent accurate, so plenty of people just ran it over Ice Beam back in the day.

With this thing you are mostly just outspeeding everything and hitting it with whatever it is weak to. The catch is the frailty. 34 HP and 19 Defense means if anything connects on the physical side, F4 is probably not surviving, so the whole game plan is do not get hit. And because it does not have the raw Special of something like Mewtwo, it does not always get the KO on the first hit either. So there are situations where you outspeed something, hit it, it lives, and then it hits you back and you are just done.

That is why it is at number three. The Speed is incredible and the coverage is solid, but at the end of the day it does not have the stats to really take over a game the way the Pokemon higher up on this list can. One thing worth knowing though: in Gen 1, critical hit rate is tied to base Speed. So a Pokemon this fast is landing crits way more often than a normal Pokemon would, which quietly makes that Special hit harder than the number suggests.

Number 2

F2 index 242

Number two, index 242, is the one I got most excited about while I was testing all of these, because F2 does not really have a dump stat. Look at the card. Every single stat is 130 or higher, and it has a base stat total of 699. In a normal Gen 1 context that is unheard of, that is above Mewtwo.

The way you actually use this is Swords Dance. You already have 152 Attack, and Swords Dance doubles it, and in Gen 1 that boost sticks around as long as you stay in. After one Swords Dance you click Earthquake and things just stop existing. Rock Slide and Psychic are there for coverage so nothing walls you. Honestly, with 135 Speed on top of that, you are outspeeding most of the format and hitting first with a doubled 152 Attack. There is not much that survives it.

So why is this not number one? One reason, and it is a real one. If you open F2's stat screen, or its status screen in battle, the game crashes. The battles themselves work completely fine, you can send it out, attack, take hits, all of it, but the moment you try to actually look at its summary, it is over. So it is a fully functional battler that you are just never allowed to inspect. That is the kind of thing that keeps it out of the top spot, because the Pokemon at number one does the same job and never crashes at all.

The Nukes

Before we get to number one, I promised you the unstable ones, and these deserve their moment. The Nukes are the glitch Pokemon that are technically stronger than anything on the main list, they just cannot be used, because they tend to freeze the game or corrupt your save the instant they show up. Think of this less as a ranking and more as a warning label.

So that is the tier where the numbers get truly absurd. 788 base stat total, 65,535 HP, moves that overwrite the opponent's health directly. And every single one of them is unusable in an actual game. Which is exactly what makes number one impressive, because number one has almost these numbers and it never breaks.

Number 1

94 and 94 h index 241 and 249

Number one is the Pokemon that the wiki literally describes as the one whose sprite never freezes. Its name reads as 94, its index is 241, and it has a base stat total of 715. To say that plainly: this is a Pokemon with a higher stat total than Mewtwo, and it is completely stable. You can send it out, open its summary, check its moves, battle with it all day, and nothing breaks.

The set is genuinely nasty. You lead with Lovely Kiss, which puts the other Pokemon to sleep, and in Gen 1 sleep is one of the strongest statuses in the game because of how long it lasts. Once they are asleep, you just start clicking Earthquake, Thunderbolt, and Body Slam depending on what is in front of you. High Speed, sleep to shut down anything scary, and near-Mewtwo stats across the board to actually close it out. There is not a real weakness here to talk you out of it, which is the whole reason it is number one.

One thing about the typing before you get too comfortable. It displays as Normal slash Ghost, but that typing is fake. It does not actually get the resistances a real Normal slash Ghost Pokemon would, so do not go planning around type immunities that are not really there. The stats and the moves are what carry it, not the type line.

And here is the part I could not leave out, because it is my favorite fact in this whole project. 94 has a twin, index 249, which reads as 94 h. Identical stats, same 715 total. But its level-up learnset reads directly from VRAM, which is the memory the Game Boy uses to draw what is on your screen. In plain terms, the moves it can learn change depending on what is being displayed at that moment. Different menu, different tiles on screen, different learnset. It is the same Pokemon as the champion of this list, except its movepool is quietly tied to what your screen looks like. I do not know a better example of Gen 1 being held together with tape than a Pokemon that learns moves based on what you are currently looking at.

Still being tested: there is a possible fifth contender, index 228, that I am calling E4. Bug slash Glitch, base stat total 401, and a base Special of 254. For reference, Mewtwo's Special is 154, so this thing would be a full 100 points above it, the highest Special I have found in Gen 1, period. The only question is whether it stays stable through a full battle. I am running that test now. If it holds up, it earns a spot on this list and the numbers shift. If it crashes, it joins the Nukes as the strongest Special stat that still could not survive being used. I will update this post either way.

E4, if it survives testingMin / Max at Lv 100

HP14138168

Attack0535

Defense122959

Speed121247277

Special254513543

Total401MinMax

So how strong is that, really?

Let us put 94's 715 next to the Pokemon people actually think of as the strongest. Gen 1 Mewtwo has a base stat total of 590, with a stat line of 106 HP, 110 Attack, 90 Defense, 130 Speed, and 154 Special. So 94 is beating Mewtwo by 125 points of total stats while also being completely legal to use in a battle. Mew, for comparison, is 100 in every stat for a total of 500.

You can even reach forward to Arceus, which is 720 across six stats in the modern games. Gen 1 only has five stats, because Special was not split into Special Attack and Special Defense until later, so in Gen 1 terms Arceus works out to about 600. Which means 94, a pile of garbage data the game read by accident, comes out ahead of the Pokemon literally designed to be a god.

There is one catch that keeps all of this a fun curiosity rather than an actual competitive problem, and it is a big one. None of these Pokemon can ever leave Generation 1. You cannot trade them up, you cannot transfer them forward, they do not exist in any format past the cartridge they were born on. The moment you try to move them anywhere, the data that makes them special stops meaning anything. So they are the strongest Pokemon almost nobody will ever play against, permanently sealed inside a Game Boy.

Which, honestly, might be for the best. A 715 stat total that puts things to sleep and then Earthquakes them would not exactly make for balanced competitive play. But it is out there, sitting in the memory of a game from 1996, stronger than Mewtwo, patiently waiting for anyone curious enough to go looking on the east coast of Cinnabar Island.

I went looking. Turns out the strongest Pokemon in Red and Blue was never a Pokemon at all.

Sprites captured from Pokemon Red and Blue, via Bulbapedia's glitch documentation. Stats and movesets verified against the ROM directly.

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