Can you beat Pokemon Red with just a MissingNo.?

I love how MissingNo hits so hard it shatters the opponent's sprite and leaves them eternally mangled

The fact that Missingno appears in the party as a trainer sprite is absolutely horrifying.

MissingNo knocking itself out from FULL HEALTH due to confusion gave me a good chuckle.

An explanation for the names (buckle up it's a doozy)(Also note that I paused the video at 11:15 when JRose mentioned it so forgive me if any of this information is redundant later on in the video): The most commonly used method to obtain MissingNo. is the "Old Man Glitch". The Old Man in Viridian City teaches you how to catch Pokemon by showing you a battle where he catches a Weedle. For this battle your name is changed to "Old Man". The game needed somewhere to store the data for your name so it stores it in the data (in hex values, not plain text) where the grass encounter table for the area is kept. It's important to note that there's three different sets of encounter tables; one for "grass" tiles (or basically any tile you can encounter pokemon by walking on it), one for "Surf" tiles (for when surfing), and one for Fishing encounters. It is also important to note that the game assumes these are decimal values, which will come into play later. So after doing the Old Man's catching tutorial, you currently have your character's name data in the place where the encounter table is. The reason they chose to put it there is because there are no "grass" tiles inside cities. Whenever you go into a new map, the old encounter map is overwritten with the new encounter map. So in order to actually encounter a pokemon in the grass you'd have to walk out of the town and into a route, which would refresh the encounter table to what it should be. And in a perfect world that would be the end of it. But this is Gen 1 we're talking about, the "broken generation", so of course there's a way to exploit it. If you fly to Cinnabar town, you've gone from one city to another. Cities do not have grass encounters, so that data is blank, meaning it won't overwrite your current encounter data (which is your trainer's name). And extremely conveniently for us, the surfable tiles on the very edge of the right side of Cinnabar island are considered "grass" tiles. You're still inside Cinnabar island here, so your encounter table does not get refreshed by the route right next to it. So, you can get an encounter and the game pulls from the data that's in the encounter list, which is your name. The second letter of your name is stored where the level for the first pokemon on the list would be. The third letter determines what pokemon it is. For example, if your name was "DAVE" in all caps, you could encounter a level 128(!) Alakazam. Looking at the name "DAVE", you ignore the first letter, then the second letter is A. A = 128 in decimal, so it's level 128. V is 149 in decimal, which is Alakazam's index number (note: not pokedex number. Pokemon were not coded in order of the pokedex. Rhydon was the first pokemon coded in, and has an index of 1, and is also why Missingno. turned into Rhydon of all pokemon at the start of the video). This continues for the rest of the list, letters 4+5 making Pokemon 2 in the list, 6+7 making pokemon 3, 8+9 making pokemon 4, and 10+11 making pokemon 5. However, trainer names can only be 7 characters long. And at the end of any custom name is a special character used to denote the end of the trainer's name. This character will be read by the game as a level 0 glitched pokemon called " 'M " (which is very similar but not identical to MissingNo). So the last two pokemon on the encounter table would always be 'M. One last thing to note is that you can also find *trainers* this way too. Trainers have index values just like pokemon. I won't get too into how their teams are decided because this comment is already a wordburger, if you're interested let me know. So, now that you hopefully understand why the names matter, let's look at JRose's name and rival name and see what they would result in (According to Glitch City Laboratory's index table): JRose's name: m(MN)a.♀tF Pokemon he could find on the coast of Cinnabar: MissingNO. Level 226 Channeler (trainer battle) Margikarp Level 179 However, I believe this was a mistake, because of we just add another letter to the start of the name we instead get: Professor Oak (Trainer Battle) Gary 2 (Trainer battle) Wartortle Level 245 You read that right: There is a Professor Oak battle programmed into the game. He has his own team and uses whichever starter you and the rival did not take. As for the Rival's name: AaRRSAx Marowak Level 160 MissingNO. Level 145 Aerodactyl Fossil Level 128 The Aerodactyl Fossil is a MissingNo. That uses the same sprite as the fossil of Aerodactyl you can find in the museum. Neat! MissingNo. was the thing that got me interested in game glitches as a kid and I spent a LOT of time messing around with it. It's been a long time and I'm by no means an expert but if you find this sort of stuff interesting let me know and I'll post some more info that might be interesting. *sources: Glitch City Laboratory (now shutdown, archived), TRsRockin (shut down, archived), Bulbapedia*

It's so cool that Missingno glitches into Rhydon (first pokemon designed) rather than Bulbasaur (first pokemon in the dex) at the start. Indicates that pokemon are stored in design order rather than dex order in the ROM.

The glitchy background was a very nice touch. Mad props to AJ

Fun fact: in Yellow this would probably be straight up impossible. MissingNo in that game has a stat spread of 178 in HP and 19 attack, 11 defense, 23 special and 0 speed, and it doesn't get TMs, only getting Pay Day, Bind and Water Gun. Even if that wasn't bad enough, in Yellow its "experience group" is actually broken and will always reset to level 1.

The names you gave yourself and your rival are pretty much an ingame code that is required to perform the MissingNo glitch, thats a really nice touch!

Gotta give several of MissingNo's opponents credit. Even after turning into mangled messes, they pressed on and managed to beat it multiple times. Determination at its finest.

I like that Missingno is just a walking attack stat

This run gave me a strange urge to see a MissingNo Pokemon movie where everyone is freaked out by the implications of this thing's existence but the protag is just hyper curious to figure out its strengths, weaknesses, what moves it can learn, etc. And then at the end he has to save his weird, glitch Pokemon from an angry mob that wants to destroy it because they're tired of being discombobulated for having looked at it one time, by accident.

6:29 it's always a small tragedy to see you run away from pikachu's in Viridian Forest. I have vivid memories of never leaving that place until I had one when I was a kid.

I don't know what was funnier, watching the graphics randomly break and send Pokemon into the abyss or watching Missingno seppuku itself in confusion. This run was so blursed and I loved it.

The names are Missingno encounter codes- the player’s at the beginning would let you encounter a level 145 Marowak, a level 145 Professor Oak, and a level 153 Gentleman trainer, the rival’s would let you encounter a level 160 Marowak, a level 145 Missingno, and a level 128 Gentleman Trainer (or possibly Aerodactyl Fossil Missingno because the characters look identical), and the run’s player’s would let you encounter a level 226 Missingno, a level 242 Channeler trainer, and a level 179 Magikarp.

The most amazing glitch in this video was Bruno actually winning a battle.

Missingno's experience group is so weird because it uses a quadratic formula (33L^2-155L+80), while the normal ones use cubic ones. The game was balanced for a cubic exp group.

Because MissingNo levels up very slow at first, and very fast later on, I wonder if a good strategy would be to use the Rare Candy as early as possible. It's the opposite of the normal logic where you use them later on because training for levels will take more time later. In the case of MissingNo, gaining levels early on will save a TON of time because it's difficult to get the needed EXP. And later on, when you can get lots of EXP, the levels will require less per level up.

My head canon is that you’re just going through Kanto, ripping apart reality with this Missingno

Honestly this run does a really good job of showing how base stat totals don't tell the whole story. MissingNo has a very low base stat total, but most pokemon with similar BSTs have mediocre stats in everything. It's really cool to see how missingno having vaguely "optimized" base stats by having a bunch of near zeros and one good number makes it perform a lot like something with a much higher actual BST would.

I love how menacing the opposing pokemon look with this pallet. The shading on Kakuna's eye and the pitch black raichu with 2 dot eyes make this feel like a horror rom hack.