Missingno Murder

Missingno Murder
Me and my brother used to play really avidly when Red, Blue and Yellow were hot on the scene with Game Boy and Game Boy Colour. As the series went on, we alternated on who bought the extra game that sat in the middle of each series, in this generation of games, I took the first turn with Yellow, while he played on Red. We had made it our mission to get every Pokemon and grind them up to stupidly high levels, it was our obsession and break from everything around us.

About a year or so down the line, my brother began to grow bored with the norm, he started looking around for cheats in the game to make things a little more interesting. In his search, he found one of the many alleged methods of capturing a glitch Pokemon, Missingno, using the cinnabar island method. The post with this glitch came with a warning - that it could corrupt the game data and cause it to be unusable, with no fix other than deleting the save.

He ignored the warning, as it turned out to be completely wrong anyway, we were glad at the time, we wanted to see what fun could be had with this.So after following the guide steps, as well as a few bad attempts at a capture, he finally got hold of his little old glitch. He quickly found the first of his quirks along the way, the item cloning, which at the time, covered his hyper potions. The move set was also weird, it had two sets of Water Gun in the first two attack slots, the other attacks I can not remember, it was a while and we were just kids.

Jumping forwards quite a while later, after messing around with Missingno in Pokemon Coliseum which gave him the substitute doll model as a placeholder, we decided to look back at our old save files and try to finish our mission. But first, a link battle, the main contender to beat being his Missingno.

About halfway into the fight, he decided to let out the monstrous glitch, so my forces fell quickly. Soon, I was left with just a Machop, which for me was strange as I'd never normally have on in the party. First round of attacks came and he used his second Water Gun on the list, I gave him a painfully weak Tackle. I thought my Machop was going to faint in a single move, but something went odd at this point. Both Missingno's and Machop's health bars began to fluctuate rapidly, and where the exp bar should be, I was seeing a second health bar for my Machop, also fluctuating.

Both Pokemon had all status effects set on at once, the sprites for status ailments mangled together into one space flashing through one another like you see with intersecting models in a 3D game.

After a moment of weirdness, my Machop somehow managed to get his Tackle in there, so the second round of attacks was on it's way and I had the frustrating alarming sound of low health blaring away at my ears. We both repeated attacks and this was going to put an end to the strange battle. Missingno went first with his Water Gun, but after a short freeze, rather than fainting, the sprites for both Pokemon changed, my Machop resembled what we would later discover to be a Lugia from the Gold/Silver generation, and his Missingno looked like a Ho-Oh, which we only recognized from the intro. A couple seconds more of fluctuating health and a very odd K.O scream later, my now Lugia sprited Machop finally fainted, except it said "Wild Machop has fainted." Wild? This was my Machop, and there are no wild Pokemon in a link battle, we were confused, but before we had time to figure it out the Game Boys shut off mid-save.

Figuring it was a battery outage, we plugged them into the mains and switched back on, my Machop had vanished from the party. It just got weirder, it wasn't in any of my PC storage boxes either. I thought to myself, "Yeah, we shouldn't have done that." So I set out to find another Machop to capture, but they just were not appearing for me, we put it down to my typical luck.

A few weeks later, on a bored empty day of near-nothingness, I lounged around and watched as he played Pokemon on the TV screen using the Nintendo 64 connection. He decided he would adventure out back into places with possible trainers he might not have battled yet. He made his way into Lavender Tower, found nobody, but on his way out noticed something we didn't spot on the way in, a player sprite stood next to a tomb stone. The character had my trainer name, and when spoken to, said, "My poor Machop, I should never have let you into that battle. Please forgive me..."

This honestly creeped us out a little, his Missingno had apparently killed my Machop, according to the new character in Lavender Tower. We searched online to see if this had happened to anyone else, and the closest links to this we could find were some images from the original comics, featuring such nasties as an Arbok being cut in half with Slash and zombie Psyducks. It was gruesome and it firmly backed the idea that Pokemon could be killed, although we didn't see how this should affect the games.

He kept playing, we were feeling pretty sure that was all the weirdness it could pull on us. He looked for trainers not yet battled and eventually found his Missingno's second victim, an NPC trainer's Growlithe. Following the same attack pattern as usual when wiping out enemies, he just clicked away at the Water Gun until there were no Pokemon left to fight, the last being Growlithe. Again, just like in the link battle, the game froze for a short moment before Growlithe fainted and again it stated "Wild" in the message. Spotting the pattern, he went straight back to the tower.

What he found was the player sprite still stood where he was, mourning the death of a Machop, and an unforgiving NPC trainer, with a random dialogue of three comments he would throw at you when spoken to. These were; "My poor, sweet Growlithe.. If only I knew you would be so cruel!" "What do you want? Leave me alone..." "How could you be so heartless? > We battle to train and learn about our Pokemon.. > To get close to them... > Like I did.... To him..... > Just get out of here!"

This was about all he could let happen, he treated the game file like corruption and overwrote his entire progress with a new save file, simply to get rid of what was done. The negative reinforcement surely didn't help, what with seeing what was in the series, it only aided the idea that deaths were originally made to be implemented into the game, but later scrapped, and as a side-effect of the Missingno's glitchy nature was somehow re-triggered. Although the game plays perfectly normal now, with a zero death toll, those strange happenings were burned into our minds. We never thought the dark side of the Pokemon franchise could have made it into a seemingly innocent children's game, but it has been made apparent that it can.