a
Every hallway has one door that looks like all the others but opens onto a normal room. In the hybrid wing, that door is index 192, and its name is a single lowercase letter: a. Not a cursor, not a smear of kana, just a. As if the game got tired and only had the energy to name this one after the first thing it could reach.
And behind the plain name is the most convincing counterfeit in the catalogue. It is a clean Water type. Its stats are balanced and sane, 65 across the board with a respectable 90 speed, the kind of spread a real mid-game Pokemon would have. It knows Bubble, Hypnosis, and Water Gun from the start, a moveset you could hand to a Poliwhirl and nobody would blink. Its catch rate is 120, meaning you can actually catch it without a fight to the death. Stand it in a line-up and it would take you a long moment to spot the impostor.
The mask only slips in the fine print. Its learnset drifts into unprintable glitch moves and a Struggle it somehow learns at level 227, and its evolution paths wander from Jynx to Electabuzz to, inevitably, MissingNo. But of all the broken things in Red and Blue, a is the one that could almost pass for a Pokemon that was meant to be here. Almost.
WATER
The bytes
| What | Where in the ROM | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Index number | slot 192 of the species table | 0xC0 (192) |
| Pokedex byte | 0x410E3 | 61 (borrowed from a real species) |
| Stats entry | 0x38A6E | 3D 41 41 41 5A 32 15 15 78 83... |
| Size byte | entry byte 10 | 0x66 = 6 wide, 6 tall (the buffer holds 7x7) |
| Name bytes | 0x1C994 | A0 36 21 C1 49 CD 49 3C 21 3A |
| Catch rate | entry byte 8 | 120 |
Front sprite pointer 0x71ED resolves into ROM bank 0x0D (deterministic) at file offset 0x371ED. The decode is deterministic: it looks the same on every cartridge, every time.
Byte for byte identical in Blue.
Base stats
Its stat spread, straight from the entry bytes. Glitch specimens love extremes, a wall with zero attack, or a paper-thin speedster.
Moves
Knows from the start: BUBBLE, HYPNOSIS, WATER GUN.
Learnset (read straight from its pointer)
| Level | Move |
|---|---|
| L185 | LEECH SEED |
| L98 | TWINEEDLE |
| L78 | THUNDERPUNCH |
| L77 | GLITCH MOVE 0xD3 |
| L58 | BUBBLE |
| L150 | GLITCH MOVE 0xA8 |
| L227 | STRUGGLE |
| L50 | SWIFT |
| L49 | THUNDERBOLT |
| L84 | EXPLOSION |
| L58 | PIN MISSILE |
| L37 | FLASH |
| L182 | BARRAGE |
| L36 | TWINEEDLE |
| L206 | THUNDERBOLT |
| L168 | LEECH LIFE |
| L133 | FISSURE |
| L141 | EARTHQUAKE |
| L57 | HYPER BEAM |
| L85 | THUNDERBOLT |
| L90 | LOVELY KISS |
| L73 | GLITCH MOVE 0xE3 |
| L236 | MIRROR MOVE |
| L66 | GLITCH MOVE 0xAA |
TM and HM compatibility (flag bits, entry bytes 20 to 26)
| Machine | Move |
|---|---|
| TM01 | MEGA PUNCH |
| TM05 | MEGA KICK |
| TM06 | TOXIC |
| TM08 | BODY SLAM |
| TM09 | TAKE DOWN |
| TM10 | DOUBLE-EDGE |
| TM11 | BUBBLEBEAM |
| TM12 | WATER GUN |
| TM13 | ICE BEAM |
| TM14 | BLIZZARD |
| TM17 | SUBMISSION |
| TM18 | COUNTER |
| TM19 | SEISMIC TOSS |
| TM20 | RAGE |
| TM26 | EARTHQUAKE |
| TM27 | FISSURE |
| TM29 | PSYCHIC |
| TM31 | MIMIC |
| TM32 | DOUBLE TEAM |
| TM34 | BIDE |
| TM35 | METRONOME |
| TM40 | SKULL BASH |
| TM44 | REST |
| TM46 | PSYWAVE |
| TM50 | SUBSTITUTE |
| HM03 | SURF |
| HM04 | STRENGTH |
Evolutions
| Trigger | Becomes |
|---|---|
| LEVEL 61 (glitch method 0x14) | JYNX (0x48) |
| LEVEL 26 (glitch method 0x5E) | \xcd\x29\x24\x21\x33\xd7\xcbO\xcd\x07 (0xFC) |
| LEVEL 69 (glitch method 0x15) | ELECTABUZZ (0x35) |
| LEVEL 147 (glitch method 0x8B) | SPEAROW (0x05) |
| LEVEL 254 (glitch method 0x1A) | MISSINGNO. (0x86) |
| LEVEL 94 (glitch method 0x45) | AERODACTYL (0xAB) |
| LEVEL 52 (glitch method 0x86) | MISSINGNO. (0x92) |
| LEVEL 187 (glitch method 0xE4) | MEOWTH (0x4D) |
Hear its cry
A cry is three bytes the game looks up by index number: a base sound, a pitch, and a length. This specimen reads a base that points past the real cries into data that was never a cry, so it comes out broken straight from the table. I rebuild the sound live from the Game Boy's two pulse channels and its noise channel. This is not a recording.
Does it still work?
This is the question people actually ask about a glitch, so here is the honest answer for this one.
| Where | Still works? |
|---|---|
| Original Game Boy cartridge | Yes. The source of every byte on this page. |
| Game Boy Color / Super Game Boy | Yes, with the auto-assigned palette shown above. |
| 3DS Virtual Console (2016 re-release) | Yes. Nintendo shipped the re-release unpatched, so this is the most accessible way to reach it in 2026. |
| Later remakes (FireRed, Let's Go, and newer) | No. Rebuilt engines, the empty-slot overflow that produces this creature is gone. |
Fight it yourself
This is our from-scratch recreation of the Red battle engine. The enemy team is preset to this specimen; pick your own fighter, glitch or otherwise.
Every number on this page was read from a Pokemon Red ROM by reproducing the game's own out-of-bounds memory reads. Nothing is invented. Part of The Glitchhouse.