The Glitchhouse
A field guide to broken Pokemon
Red and Blue contain 70 distinct creatures that were never designed: 'M, one MissingNo. that answers to 36 different addresses plus its three special forms, and 65 uniquely named hybrids living past the end of the species table. Every page here is decoded straight from the ROM, byte by byte, every specimen has a cry rebuilt from the cartridge, and every one can be fought in our recreation of the battle engine.
The Lab · Interactive
Don't just read about them. Fight them.
The Glitchhouse has a working half. The Lab is where the decoded data comes alive: a Gen 1 battle engine rebuilt from scratch, and tools that turn the glitches into things you can actually play with.
The Battler
A from-scratch recreation of the Pokemon Red battle engine. Build a team, fight any glitch or real Pokemon, or battle a friend over a link code.
Open the Battler →
The Name Glitch
Type a name and see exactly which wild and glitch Pokemon the old-man Cinnabar glitch would summon from it, cries and all.
Try it →
Deep dives · Long reads
The stories behind the glitches
Each of these is a full, interactive investigation of one famous Red and Blue glitch: how it works, why it happens, and what it does, all decoded from the ROM and built to play with, not just read.
The Old Man Glitch
Turn your name into wild Pokemon on the Cinnabar coast. Why the sea reads your letters as monsters, byte by byte.
Read it →The Mew Glitch
The Trainer-Fly trick that summons Mew from a leftover pointer. The whole setup, walked step by step.
Read it →Item Duplication
How MissingNo. adds 128 to your sixth item, and the Pokedex seen-flag bug that is really doing it.
Read it →Super Glitch
The moves with no name. Why printing one runs the game off the end of its own text and corrupts memory.
Read it →Glitch City
Walk off the edge of the map into a town built from leftover blocks. How you fall in, and how you get out.
Read it →Mew Under the Truck
The playground rumor, tested against the ROM. What is really under the S.S. Anne truck, and why the rumor spread.
Read it →Arbitrary Code Execution
The deepest glitch of all: hand the Game Boy new instructions and make it run code that was never in the game.
Read it →The specimens
'M
The index-zero glitch that evolves into Kangaskhan, decoded from the R...
MISSINGNO.
The most famous glitch Pokemon in Red and Blue, decoded from the ROM a...
MissingNo. (Fossil Kabutops form)
Walk into the Pewter City museum and look at the skeleton behind the g...
MissingNo. (Fossil Aerodactyl form)
The second skeleton in the Pewter museum has a wilder silhouette than...
MissingNo. (Ghost form)
Climb Pokemon Tower in Lavender Town before you have the Silph Scope a...
A
Its name is a menu cursor followed by a capital A, the little arrow yo...
a
Every hallway has one door that looks like all the others but opens on...
(C1)
The name is a single katakana character followed by nothing the game c...
.4
The name trails off into a period and a four, like a file that got sav...
h POKe
The name carries the game's own POKe glyph inside it, the little...
PokeWTrainer
Read the name aloud and it stops being random: the game's POKe gl...
PkMn (C5)
Its name is the PkMn glyph, the two-letter abbreviation the game keeps...
L M 4
The name is a traffic jam: a katakana u, an L, a double vertical bar t...
P T
Look at the very first character of its name: the female symbol. In Re...
U?
Its name ends in a question mark, which turns out to be the most hones...
8
The name opens with a small solid triangle, one of the corner tiles th...
PC 4S H
The first two letters of its name are PC, the storage computer, the bl...
P
The whole name is a single capital P. Not a word, not a smear of symbo...
PkMn n
Buried in its name is the PkMn glyph, the game's own shorthand fo...
Trainer
No symbols, no kana, no cursor. Its name is just the word Trainer, spe...
W G d
The name begins with the little down-pointing triangle that blinks at...
OPkMn4X
The name looks less like a name than a stock code stamped on a crate:...
PkMn PkMn T
Its name stutters, the PkMn glyph printed twice in a row before traili...
4B 8 4 8
The name is nothing but numbers with spaces between them, 4B 8 4 8, li...
'
The name is almost nothing: a single katakana u, a space, and a lone a...
M p'u
Say the name out loud and you can almost hear a mouth trying to form a...
A G
The name is bookended, an A at the front and a G at the back with a ka...
P
The name fades out. A P, then a katakana u, then another, then another...
4 h
Two characters, a 4 and an h, with a single space holding them apart....
Glitch (D7)
Everything in this wing has a name of some kind, a cursor or a stutter...
'M (FF), the Charizard one
The last index a single byte can express. At slot 255 the game reads o...
Recently built
Gen 2
The Coin Case glitch
Arbitrary code execution in Gold & Silver: an unterminated name runs an invalid command and your data runs as code.
Gen 2
The Celebi Egg glitch
Hatch a real Celebi in Gold, Silver & Crystal, because Beat Up and Celebi share index number 251.
Gen 2
The cloning glitch
Duplicate any Pokemon and the item it holds by cutting power at the exact moment the game saves a box switch.
Gen 1
The Ditto glitch
A wild Ditto's Transform becomes a dial for the Mew glitch: its Special stat picks the species you encounter.
Gen 1
ZZAZZ
The glitch trainer that floods your money to the maximum and eats your save, decoded byte by byte.
39 more specimens are being catalogued. New files land continuously.