U?
Its name ends in a question mark, which turns out to be the most honest punctuation in the catalogue, because index 200 hides a genuine secret. Read down its evolution data and there it is, plain as anything: at level 3, ゥU? evolves into Mew.
Mew. The 151st Pokemon, the one Game Freak tucked away and never officially released, the white whale of an entire generation of playground rumors. And here is a sliver of garbage that can simply become it, no event, no truck, no cartridge swap, just a garbage evolution pointer that happens to land on species 21 and read it as an instruction. For anyone who spent 1998 believing Mew was under a truck near the S.S. Anne, this specimen is a quiet vindication. The impossible Pokemon really was hiding in the game. It was just hiding in the broken part.
The body it evolves from is the same defensive wall as ゥ .4 over at index 194, that 209 defense stacked on a feeble special, flattened into the same six-wide, one-tall sliver sprite. They share a stats entry, twins in bulk and shape. But where ゥ .4 dreamed of a Lapras, this one keeps company with Drowzee, Rapidash, Koffing, and, at the very top of the list, Mew. A one-pixel-tall wall with the rarest creature in the game folded into its future. Ask it what it is, and the honest answer really is a question mark.
GLITCH TYPE 0x61 GLITCH TYPE 0x27
The bytes
| What | Where in the ROM | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Index number | slot 200 of the species table | 0xC8 (200) |
| Pokedex byte | 0x410EB | 234 (borrowed from a real species) |
| Stats entry | 0x39D5A | 60 B3 60 D1 60 15 61 27 61 30... |
| Size byte | entry byte 10 | 0x61 = 1 wide, 6 tall (the buffer holds 7x7) |
| Name bytes | 0x1C9E4 | CF 3E 04 EA 94 CF CD E6 2B C1 |
| Catch rate | entry byte 8 | 97 |
Front sprite pointer 0x6151 resolves into ROM bank 0x0D (deterministic) at file offset 0x36151. 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: GLITCH MOVE 0xBE, AGILITY, GLITCH MOVE 0xE4, AGILITY.
Learnset (read straight from its pointer)
| Level | Move |
|---|---|
| L16 | DRAGON RAGE |
| L164 | GLITCH MOVE 0xB1 |
| L14 | DOUBLE KICK |
| L84 | SOLARBEAM |
| L75 | THUNDERBOLT |
| L92 | GLITCH MOVE 0xA9 |
| L47 | WHIRLWIND |
| L151 | THUNDERSHOCK |
| L41 | GUILLOTINE |
| L149 | GLITCH MOVE 0xD2 |
| L180 | RAGE |
| L75 | GLITCH MOVE 0xFF |
| L20 | BONEMERANG |
| L210 | VINE WHIP |
| L92 | FOCUS ENERGY |
| L43 | ABSORB |
| L14 | GLITCH MOVE 0xCE |
| L97 | TWINEEDLE |
| L195 | THUNDERSHOCK |
| L116 | SOLARBEAM |
| L103 | DOUBLE-EDGE |
| L201 | GLITCH MOVE 0xE5 |
| L212 | GLITCH MOVE 0xAA |
| L171 | ABSORB |
TM and HM compatibility (flag bits, entry bytes 20 to 26)
| Machine | Move |
|---|---|
| TM02 | RAZOR WIND |
| TM06 | TOXIC |
| TM07 | HORN DRILL |
| TM09 | TAKE DOWN |
| TM15 | HYPER BEAM |
| TM18 | COUNTER |
| TM22 | SOLARBEAM |
| TM23 | DRAGON RAGE |
| TM25 | THUNDER |
| TM31 | MIMIC |
| TM34 | BIDE |
| TM38 | FIRE BLAST |
| TM39 | SWIFT |
| TM42 | DREAM EATER |
| TM43 | SKY ATTACK |
| TM44 | REST |
| TM45 | THUNDER WAVE |
| TM46 | PSYWAVE |
| TM47 | EXPLOSION |
| TM50 | SUBSTITUTE |
| HM04 | STRENGTH |
| HM05 | FLASH |
Evolutions
| Trigger | Becomes |
|---|---|
| LEVEL 84 (glitch method 0x5A) | DROWZEE (0x30) |
| LEVEL 164 (glitch method 0x6C) | RAPIDASH (0xA4) |
| LEVEL 3 (glitch method 0x41) | MEW (0x15) |
| LEVEL 10 (glitch method 0x27) | KOFFING (0x37) |
| LEVEL 68 (glitch method 0xA4) | VENONAT (0x41) |
| LEVEL 84 (glitch method 0xA1) | MISSINGNO. (0x45) |
| LEVEL 73 (glitch method 0x1A) | h\xcaPOKe\x1f\x06\x1c\x21\x6a\x7b\xcd (0xC3) |
| LEVEL 90 (glitch method 0x24) | MAGIKARP (0x85) |
It can evolve into Mew. At level 3.
Its evolution data is read from a pointer that never pointed at evolution data. The game finds a garbage stream there and follows it anyway, and decoded, that stream is a slot machine of destinations, more than twenty of them, at levels both ordinary and absurd. Most sit above level 100, unreachable. One does not.
Twenty-odd futures written in noise, and the one you can actually reach is the one the game was never supposed to give you. If you want the other door to the same Pokemon, there is the Mew glitch.
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 its three bytes 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.