The Glitchhouse · Specimen Files
▶ A glitch Pokemon sprite
Specimen 0xBF · HYBRID

A

GLITCH TYPE 0x0B / NORMAL · index 191

Its name is a menu cursor followed by a capital A, the little arrow you push around to select FIGHT or RUN, wandering loose in a name it should never have been part of. That is the tell of a hybrid glitch: the game reads control characters as letters and prints whatever falls out. Index 191 is the very first slot past the museum fossils and the Lavender ghost, the doorway into the long strange hallway of hybrids that fills most of this catalogue.

The numbers are a paradox. Zero attack, the weakest possible, bolted to a speed of 178, which at level 100 makes it faster than nearly anything in Kanto. It is a creature built to strike first and then do nothing at all, except that its very first move is Guillotine, a one-hit knockout that ignores attack entirely. A glass hummingbird carrying a guillotine. It also opens with Razor Wind and, of all things, Pay Day, so it can lose a fight and still leave you richer.

Its evolution data is the usual hybrid fever dream, but one path stands out: at level 50 it becomes Scyther, a clean, real, green mantis. The rest of the paths dissolve into MissingNo. and unprintable garbage, but that one Scyther waiting in the noise is the kind of accident that makes this whole hallway worth walking.

▶ A glitch Pokemon sprite, Game Boy
Game Boy
▶ A glitch Pokemon sprite, Super Game Boy colors
Super Game Boy palette

GLITCH TYPE 0x0B NORMAL

The bytes

WhatWhere in the ROMValue
Index numberslot 191 of the species table0xBF (191)
Pokedex byte0x410E2250 (borrowed from a real species)
Stats entry0x39F1A19 25 00 28 B2 13 0B 00 17 11...
Size byteentry byte 100x25 = 5 wide, 2 tall (the buffer holds 7x7)
Name bytes0x1C98ACD 0F 19 CD ED 3D CD 80 36 CD
Catch rateentry byte 823

Front sprite pointer 0x0B00 resolves into ROM bank 0 (deterministic) at file offset 0xB00. 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.

HP
37
Attack
0
Defense
40
Speed
178
Special
19
Total
274

Moves

Knows from the start: GUILLOTINE, RAZOR WIND, PAY DAY.

Learnset (read straight from its pointer)

LevelMove
L67KARATE CHOP
L237SPIKE CANNON
L71DEFENSE CURL
L243HYPER BEAM
L33REST
L148CRABHAMMER
L90SUPERSONIC
L48DOUBLE-EDGE
L218POISONPOWDER
L68SUPERSONIC
L204GLITCH MOVE 0xB6
L40ROCK THROW
L166HAZE
L91GLITCH MOVE 0xC1
L173GUST
L180DISABLE
L198GLITCH MOVE 0xB3
L86BIND
L8GLITCH MOVE 0xCA
L172FLASH
L231BIND
L8SLUDGE
L29THUNDER
L191LEECH SEED

TM and HM compatibility (flag bits, entry bytes 20 to 26)

MachineMove
TM11BUBBLEBEAM
TM13ICE BEAM
TM18COUNTER
TM19SEISMIC TOSS
TM25THUNDER
TM26EARTHQUAKE
TM27FISSURE
TM29PSYCHIC
TM30TELEPORT
TM34BIDE
TM35METRONOME
TM41SOFTBOILED
TM43SKY ATTACK
TM44REST
TM46PSYWAVE
TM48ROCK SLIDE

Evolutions

TriggerBecomes
LEVEL 50 (glitch method 0xFC)SCYTHER (0x1A)
LEVEL 106 (glitch method 0x39)\x4b\xcd\x3a\x36\x3e\x02\xea\xf0\xd5\xc9 (0xF0)
LEVEL 124 (glitch method 0x6A)MISSINGNO. (0x57)
LEVEL 170 (glitch method 0x4E)\xd7\x3d\x3e\x12'M\xcd\x20\x29\xcd (0xFF)
LEVEL 143 (glitch method 0xF9)IVYSAUR (0x09)
LEVEL 33 (glitch method 0xFD)? (0xE3)
LEVEL 231 (glitch method 0xB1)MAGNEMITE (0xAD)
LEVEL 196 (glitch method 0xA3)M\xcd\x20\x29p'u\x3e\x01\xea (0xD3)

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.

base 0xF0 pitch 0xF3 length 0xA7 out-of-bounds base cry: the game reads sound data that was never a cry

Does it still work?

This is the question people actually ask about a glitch, so here is the honest answer for this one.

WhereStill works?
Original Game Boy cartridgeYes. The source of every byte on this page.
Game Boy Color / Super Game BoyYes, 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.