Missingno

There’s this process to find it. Talk to the old man in Viridian City, let him show you how to catch Pokémon. Fly to Cinnabar Island. Surf the eastern coast, that narrow strip where the game’s code starts to tangle. Eventually it appears: a corrupted block of pixels, data bent into something almost physical. Missingno. Missing number. We called it that because there wasn’t anything else to call it.

I still don’t know how we heard about it. This was before the internet was everywhere, before strategy guides got solved in real time. Through playgrounds and hallways and the weird underground network of childhood rumor, it reached us anyway. And once it did, we weren’t just kids catching monsters in a handheld game. We became something different—explorers at the edge of something we weren’t supposed to touch, and that feeling was electric.

The mythology around it was darker than the glitch itself. Missingno would corrupt your save. It could breed infinitely. It held power no normal Pokémon should have, some kind of incomprehensible strength that only made sense as an error. Nintendo’s warnings only made it more appealing. In an era when games shipped broken and stayed broken, when a corrupted cartridge was just forever your problem, Missingno was genuine danger. You knew catching it might destroy everything. You knew there was no guide, no community, no way to fix it. The designers hadn’t accounted for this.

What I miss isn’t the glitch itself. It’s the space it occupied. Games left room for mystery, for genuine unknowns, for something truly untested and genuinely risky. We lived in the margins of the code. We tested limits nobody had anticipated. There was something clean about that—some kind of freedom I don’t think we get back.