Trainer
No symbols, no kana, no cursor. Its name is just the word Trainer, spelled out clean, the same word the game prints above every gym leader and bug catcher you have ever fought. Index 205 carries it plainly, and that plainness is the unsettling part, because Trainer is not a name a Pokemon should ever have. It is a category the game uses to decide whether the thing in front of you is a wild animal or a person with a team. To meet a wild creature wearing that label is to meet a small contradiction walking around in the grass.
The body only sharpens the joke. It wears Magnemite, species 81, the floating magnet, the single most machine-like Pokemon in all of Kanto, a screw with an eye. So here is a creature the game calls Trainer, dressed as the least animal thing it has, a pure Electric type with Magnemite's high special stat and its Thunder Wave. A person-flag, wearing a robot, pretending to be a monster. Three different ideas of what it means to exist, stacked into one 5 by 5 sprite.
Its evolutions wander from Nidoqueen to Haunter through the usual unprintable static, and like the other Trainer-named specimens it sits near the machinery of the game's most dangerous exploits, the ones that turn a mislabeled battle into a rewritten save. But taken on its own, Trainer is simplest read as a philosophy problem in cartridge form. It is named after the player, shaped like a machine, and filed among the monsters. Pick any two and they disagree.
ELECTRIC
The bytes
| What | Where in the ROM | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Index number | slot 205 of the species table | 0xCD (205) |
| Pokedex byte | 0x410F0 | 81 (borrowed from a real species) |
| Stats entry | 0x38C9E | 51 19 23 46 2D 5F 17 17 BE 59... |
| Size byte | entry byte 10 | 0x55 = 5 wide, 5 tall (the buffer holds 7x7) |
| Name bytes | 0x1CA16 | 5D 22 50 CD 3C 3C 21 26 D1 CB |
| Catch rate | entry byte 8 | 190 |
Front sprite pointer 0x5B87 resolves into ROM bank 0x0D (deterministic) at file offset 0x35B87. 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: TACKLE.
Learnset (read straight from its pointer)
| Level | Move |
|---|---|
| L16 | COUNTER |
| L185 | ROLLING KICK |
| L255 | STUN SPORE |
| L118 | JUMP KICK |
| L171 | GLITCH MOVE 0xCE |
| L5 | THUNDER WAVE |
| L5 | THUNDERBOLT |
| L34 | MIST |
| L119 | GLITCH MOVE 0xFF |
| L139 | SPORE |
| L130 | GLITCH MOVE 0xDA |
| L80 | GLITCH MOVE 0xAA |
| L149 | COMET PUNCH |
| L225 | SUPER FANG |
| L42 | DRAGON RAGE |
| L99 | SPORE |
| L75 | SUBSTITUTE |
| L99 | DREAM EATER |
| L164 | GLITCH MOVE 0xC6 |
| L57 | THUNDERBOLT |
| L76 | FLY |
| L153 | CONFUSE RAY |
| L85 | LOVELY KISS |
| L139 | WATERFALL |
TM and HM compatibility (flag bits, entry bytes 20 to 26)
| Machine | Move |
|---|---|
| TM06 | TOXIC |
| TM09 | TAKE DOWN |
| TM10 | DOUBLE-EDGE |
| TM20 | RAGE |
| TM24 | THUNDERBOLT |
| TM25 | THUNDER |
| TM30 | TELEPORT |
| TM31 | MIMIC |
| TM32 | DOUBLE TEAM |
| TM33 | REFLECT |
| TM34 | BIDE |
| TM39 | SWIFT |
| TM44 | REST |
| TM45 | THUNDER WAVE |
| TM50 | SUBSTITUTE |
| HM05 | FLASH |
Evolutions
| Trigger | Becomes |
|---|---|
| LEVEL 162 (glitch method 0x38) | MISSINGNO. (0xB5) |
| LEVEL 96 (glitch method 0x3C) | \x08\x21\xf3PkMn\x18\x03\x21\xeePkMn\xcd (0xE0) |
| LEVEL 206 (glitch method 0x98) | NIDOQUEEN (0x10) |
| LEVEL 204 (glitch method 0xDF) | HAUNTER (0x93) |
| LEVEL 202 (glitch method 0x23) | MISSINGNO. (0x34) |
| LEVEL 48 (glitch method 0x67) | AERODACTYL (0xAB) |
| LEVEL 11 (glitch method 0xD3) | VENONAT (0x41) |
| TRADE | KADABRA (0x26) |
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.