P T
Look at the very first character of its name: the female symbol. In Red and Blue that glyph exists only for a scattered handful of names and text strings, because gender itself does not exist yet. No Pokemon in Kanto is male or female. That machinery would not arrive until Gold and Silver, two years later. So a wild creature wearing ♀ at the front of its name is a little ghost from the future, a symbol for a mechanic the game has not invented.
Under the sign it is another of the great faceless heavyweights. Index 199 shares the same borrowed data as its siblings deeper in the C-block, the 232 HP body with triple-digit bulk and two glitch types that answer to no chart. Its sprite reads from video memory, so it flickers here between memory-state reconstructions, a giant whose face is on loan from your screen.
Where it carves out its own identity is the moveset. It opens with the usual heavyweight bundle, then its learnset hands it Dragon Rage, Fire Spin, and a Pay Day it somehow knows at level 10, a strange spread of elemental attacks for a creature with no fixed element. Its evolutions stay oddly grounded, Pidgey and Nidorina and Machop twice over, as if the future-symbol on its name only reached so far. A monster labeled with a feature that would not exist for years, dreaming of becoming a Machop.
GLITCH TYPE 0x8D GLITCH TYPE 0x84
The bytes
| What | Where in the ROM | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Index number | slot 199 of the species table | 0xC7 (199) |
| Pokedex byte | 0x410EA | 205 (borrowed from a real species) |
| Stats entry | 0x39A2E | 91 E8 93 91 80 88 8D 84 91 F5... |
| Size byte | entry byte 10 | 0x50 = 0 wide, 5 tall (the buffer holds 7x7) |
| Name bytes | 0x1C9DA | F5 AF EA 26 CC EA 36 CC EA 93 |
| Catch rate | entry byte 8 | 145 |
Front sprite pointer 0x8E8F points into VRAM/RAM (depends on memory state). There is no sprite data there, only whatever your Game Boy was doing a moment ago. The images above cycle through three reconstructions seeded with different video memory states.
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: BARRAGE, CLAMP, LEECH LIFE, HI JUMP KICK.
Learnset (read straight from its pointer)
| Level | Move |
|---|---|
| L96 | DRAGON RAGE |
| L35 | GLITCH MOVE 0xB2 |
| L228 | DREAM EATER |
| L10 | PAY DAY |
| L26 | FIRE SPIN |
| L169 | SLAM |
| L237 | GLARE |
| L140 | PETAL DANCE |
| L116 | GLITCH MOVE 0xE4 |
| L130 | ABSORB |
| L214 | WATER GUN |
| L129 | HYDRO PUMP |
| L224 | HI JUMP KICK |
| L65 | JUMP KICK |
| L72 | DREAM EATER |
| L98 | GLITCH MOVE 0xA8 |
| L226 | DRILL PECK |
| L34 | ICE PUNCH |
| L153 | SUBMISSION |
| L150 | SUPERSONIC |
| L83 | LEECH LIFE |
| L38 | FIRE PUNCH |
| L74 | STRUGGLE |
| L49 | DOUBLE TEAM |
TM and HM compatibility (flag bits, entry bytes 20 to 26)
| Machine | Move |
|---|---|
| TM02 | RAZOR WIND |
| TM08 | BODY SLAM |
| TM13 | ICE BEAM |
| TM15 | HYPER BEAM |
| TM18 | COUNTER |
| TM21 | MEGA DRAIN |
| TM24 | THUNDERBOLT |
| TM27 | FISSURE |
| TM29 | PSYCHIC |
| TM32 | DOUBLE TEAM |
| TM33 | REFLECT |
| TM34 | BIDE |
| TM35 | METRONOME |
| TM36 | SELFDESTRUCT |
| TM40 | SKULL BASH |
| TM43 | SKY ATTACK |
| TM48 | ROCK SLIDE |
| TM49 | TRI ATTACK |
| HM03 | SURF |
Evolutions
| Trigger | Becomes |
|---|---|
| LEVEL 99 (glitch method 0x8C) | PIDGEY (0x24) |
| LEVEL 55 (glitch method 0x53) | NIDORINA (0xA8) |
| LEVEL 172 (glitch method 0x28) | MACHOP (0x6A) |
| LEVEL 80 (glitch method 0x94) | MACHOP (0x6A) |
| LEVEL 91 (glitch method 0x94) | MISSINGNO. (0x8C) |
| LEVEL 180 (glitch method 0x54) | CHARIZARD (0xB4) |
| LEVEL 152 (glitch method 0xC2) | \x39\xd6\xc94\x38\xcdh\xc0\xcd\xd7 (0xD6) |
| LEVEL 222 (glitch method 0x8D) | GROWLITHE (0x21) |
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.