Like No One Ever Was

The hacker subculture of Pokemon speedrunning

By yaboyhud

“Take this, take this, it’s good for you!” The word was out. Children everywhere were beefing up their Pokemon artificially with drugs like an illegal steroid ring. My own starting six were all maxed out due to a constant diet of infinite Rare Candies and Calciums. No wild Pokemon was safe from my never-ending supply of Master Balls. Someone from little School 18 in Troy, NY had gotten wind of something called Missing No. How it worked, nobody knew. But it was slowly disseminated in whispers during class, lunch and after school. “You hafta talk to the Old Man…Where?…In Viridian City you dummy…Oh, then what?…Surf up and down the east shore of Cinnabar for a while and then you’ll see it…See what?…Missing No.!

It was a phenomenon that needed to be seen to be believed. Pokemon was everywhere. The little Pocket Monsters could be found on television, on lunch boxes, in candy, even on disposable birthday tableware. Now twenty years later, Pokemon has adapted well, offering the first truly AR game alongside an artsy live-action Super Bowl commercial. Now that the generation whose education growing up included catching Pokemon is finally reaching maturity in their twenties, our definition of play has evolved.

For many children, the Game Boy was their first exposure to a computer. Complicated, adult-sounding concepts such as persistent storage and networking were introduced innocently within Pokemon as Bill’s PC and trading Kadabras into Alakazams. Typing, commands, and the abstraction of controls became second nature. Unbeknownst to children and parents at the time, the first roots of hacking were also beginning to take hold as well. Pokemon was a game, and that meant the rules could be broken.

Computer “hacking” has now become a well-recognized skill in today’s society as demonstrated by the popularity of cryptography, deep web, and computer science in general. As more and more of the world is dominated by software automation, an ability to navigate the highly dense system and get to what one needs efficiently is incredibly important. As the original author of the Perl programming language stated, the three virtues of a good pro-gamer are laziness, impatience, and hubris. The two objectives of Pokemon are to beat the Elite Four, and to “catch ’em all”. So when most children around the world were walking back and forth through patches of grass, the hackers were all surfing.

Underneath the pixels and sounds of Pokemon are simple electric potentials of 0's and 1's, where the Missing No. cheat goes to work. During a talk with the Old Man, the game temporarily stores your name starting from the same memory address that is used to calculate Pokemon encounters. It is the only time in the game where your name is manipulated in this way and the programmer responsible was probably unaware of the consequences when he was deciding what to do with this one-of case. It soon became the unique touchpoint where hordes of impatient, lazy, and proud children found their shortcut. When the Old Man scene is done, the game gives you back your name and resets the memory address where it was located, but not what follows. Combined with some wacky terrain where the game doesn’t quite know where you are, Pokemon encounters start becoming very strange. From lvl 255 Pokemon that can be knocked out in one hit to cryptic flickering bars of pixels, curious boys unknowingly found something both interesting and fun that was math-related, but wasn’t multiplication tables.

When a player knocked out a Missing No, the sixth item in the player’s backpack would be glitched to be constantly 128. This meant that the Missing No. cheat effectively allowed the gamer to have infinite items, and by proxy, infinite lvl 100 Pokemon, infinite money, and 100% catch rate on all Pokemon via infinite Master Balls. As soon as you performed the cheat, the game as it was intended to be played by the developers was made instantly trivial. In school, boys were just boys, but in the digital world of Kanto, they were gods.

How somebody originally found the cheat is probably never going to be clear. But with modern technology twenty years later, the Missing No. cheat, along with many other hacks, is fully explained on underground forums, creating an entire glitching subculture. Players, now with a taste of the power hacking provided, started sharing all sorts of innovative methods to manipulate the very fabric of the Pokemon game. And since the Missing No. cheat ostensibly ended the game once you performed it, the game became one of speed.