Write Your Name in Unown

What Are the Unown?

Unown is Pokemon #201 in Gold, Silver and Crystal, and it is the only Pokemon that doubles as an alphabet. The game files call it the SYMBOL Pokemon, a Psychic type that stands 1 ft 8 in and weighs 11.0 lb, with no gender, no way to breed, and exactly one move: Hidden Power, learned at level 1 and never replaced, because there is nothing else on the list. Not a single TM or HM works on it either. All 26 letters share those exact numbers, so the letter is pure looks.

The three Pokedex entries can't agree on what Unown even is. Gold says their shapes look like hieroglyphs on ancient tablets, Silver says its flat, thin body is always stuck on walls, and Crystal reasons that because different types of Unown exist, they must have a variety of abilities. In the data every one of them shares a single move list, and that list is one move long.

Why Does the Alphabet Stop at Z?

Because the game counts to 26 and stops. The Crystal disassembly defines the forms UNOWN_A through UNOWN_Z and sets NUM_UNOWN to 26, so there is no Unown for a number, a full stop or an apostrophe, and this page skips those with a note. Later games added an exclamation mark form and a question mark form, but Gold, Silver and Crystal never had them. The one extra I let through is the hyphen, because Crystal's own Ho-Oh chamber carves HO-OH into its wall with a little dash between the halves. Accented letters lose the accent, so É is written as E.

Which letter you meet is decided by the Pokemon's DVs, the hidden values that also set its stats. The game takes the middle two bits of each of the four DVs (Attack, Defense, Speed and Special), glues them into one number from 0 to 255, divides by 10 and adds one. A to Y get ten of those numbers each, but Z only gets the six from 250 to 255, which makes Z the hardest letter to roll. And if a wild Unown rolls a letter you haven't unlocked yet, the game throws its DVs away and rolls again.

What Is Inside the Ruins of Alph?

You reach the Ruins through a gate from Route 32 or Route 36, and the researchers there say they are about 1500 years old, although nobody knows why they were built or by whom. Four chambers each hold a sliding panel puzzle of an ancient Pokemon: Kabuto, Omanyte, Aerodactyl and Ho-Oh. Solve one and the floor opens under your feet, you drop into the Inner Chamber, and the game tells you there is a strange presence here. Each puzzle releases its own letters:

• the Kabuto puzzle releases A to K,
• the Omanyte puzzle releases L to R,
• the Aerodactyl puzzle releases S to W,
• and the Ho-Oh puzzle releases X to Z.

Every wild slot in the Inner Chamber is a level 5 Unown. Catch three different letters and a scientist walks you over to the Research Center to give your Pokedex an Unown mode, which records them in the order you caught them and shows a word for each one, ANGRY for A all the way to ZOOM for Z. Every word starts with its own letter, and the one for X is XXXXX. That's not a typo on my end, the data really says XXXXX. Catch all 26 and the printer in the Research Center finally works: "UNOWN may be printed out." One more oddity: stand in the Ruins, tune the radio to 13.5, and a station called ????? comes on.

What Do the Crystal Walls Say?

Crystal adds writing to the chamber walls, and those four messages are in the decoder too: ESCAPE in the Kabuto chamber, LIGHT in the Aerodactyl chamber, WATER in the Omanyte chamber and HO-OH in the Ho-Oh chamber. Every one of them is an instruction. Use an Escape Rope inside the Kabuto chamber, use Flash in the Aerodactyl chamber, walk into the Omanyte chamber carrying a Water Stone (in your bag or held by a party Pokemon), or walk into the Ho-Oh chamber with Ho-Oh at the front of your party, and the room shakes and the wall opens. Behind each one is a room with four items, Mystic Water in the Omanyte room and Charcoal in the Ho-Oh room among them, and a passage that goes further in. Gold and Silver have the same four puzzles but none of the wall messages, so if those were your games, the walls never talked to you.

How Does This Page Draw Your Name?

Every letter is Crystal's own front sprite for that Unown, the first frame, cut from the disassembly at its native 40 by 40 pixels and scaled with hard pixel edges, so nothing ever gets smoothed. Six letters, D, E, J, Q, U and W, look different in Gold and Silver, and you are seeing Crystal's versions. The colours are the four Game Boy greens this site uses, not Unown's real palette, which is green in Gold and Silver and grey in Crystal. The share card is 1200 by 630 pixels and every single pixel of it is one of those four greens.

The picture is drawn right in your browser, and your name only travels where you send it: the copied link carries it in the address, and the card carries it in the picture. Once your name is up on the wall, try the Decode tab and see how many of the 30 real words you can read without the key. And if Gen 2 is your era, Footprint Detective asks you to name Pokemon from their Pokedex footprints, and Who Said It? does the same with lines of dialogue.