An incomplete list of some of my favourite early Pokemon game glitches

pearlouettes:

terrifictentacle:

konekoling:

• If you end an encounter in a draw, the game will behave as if you lost, but the victory jingle will still play anyways.
  
• You can evolve a Pokemon that requires a stone to evolve without using an item by leveling it up in battle, and then finishing the battle with a Pokemon with a hexadecimal identifier equal to the needed stone.
• All items intended to quadruple attack accuracy actually quarter it instead. Whoops.
• Some of the hidden items in the Japanese releases of Red and Green just have flat-out incorrect coordinates for the itemfinder’s reference, and if you pick up one out of this set of six miscoded items, the other five become unobtainable.
• The aforementioned hidden items can, however, somehow be made obtainable again by moving a fossil item out of your inventory.
• You can use the storage system to get yourself a party of only fainted pokemon. This results in the player character blacking out four steps after leaving the PC
• If you catch a Pokemon that has used transform, via legitimate moveset, use of metronome, or otherwise, the game will just assume it was a ditto once it’s in your possession.
  
• You can end the encounter with the Ghost Marowak without a Sylph Scope by just throwing a Pokedoll at it.
• Catching an ‘M with a Hexadecimal identifier of 00 will leave behind an invisible but otherwise Completely Normal Ditto with its previous moveset at level 0 or 80 that needs to be caught or defeated before the battle can properly end. These games have been out for twenty years and we still don’t know why this happens.
• You can buy any of the drinks in the Celadon vending machines as long as you have enough to buy a Fresh Water.
• Walking around enough with Pikachu off screen in Yellow can just completely destroy the game for some reason.
• If you force a glitch Pokemon with a hexadecimal value of FF into your party, the game will treat it as a hybrid of both Charizard and the cancel button. The game treats this whole scenario about as well as you would expect.
• Attempting to use the Mew Encounter exploit with a Pokemon with a special stat of over 250 results in encountering a glitch trainer who causes the game to just flip the absolute fuck out when trying to calculate how much money to award you afterwards. This causes the relevant memory poiner to shoot off to god knows where, and as a result it just sets a solid two hundred unrelated hexadecimal values in the game to 99 in the process, filling your party with level 153 Bulbasaur that can only use explosion.

don’t forget how certain pokeballs are just completely useless/contradictory to their descriptions in gen 2, like for instance the Moon Ball only affects pokemon that evolve with burn heal, and the Fast Ball only affects Magnemite, Grimer and Tangela for whatever reason

my fav thing abt the previous commenter’s linked programming error is that the “love ball” contradicts its description and only has an increased catch rate if it’s Gay