Thread:MarioFan5050/@comment-25653892-20150413034352/@comment-25653892-20150414000838

Fun fax: during the Old Man's tutorial battle in PoKéMoN rue and bled's Viridian City, the player's name is replaced with "OLD MAN" so that this displays in his battle, rather than name the player chose. The player's name is saved internally to the main (tall grass-initiated) encounterable pokeymans list for Cinnabar Island, in hexadecimal form as data tends to be, due to that space being blank most of the time, overwritten by whatever corresponding data was used last, and tied to a map that was not supposed to have any wild battles anyway. Due to the form of hexadecimal data storage, with all those letters from the front of the alphabet tacked on after nine but before ten, certain letters in certain parts of the player's name can actually trigger valid Pokémon index numbers in any grass on Cinnabar Island—those for glitch Pokémon. This is because there were gonna be 190 Pokémon species in Rad and Bloe, but they were cut and saved for the second Pokémans generation, and replaced internally by the identifier "MISSINGNO.", as in "missing index number".

Now normally this shouldn't be a problem, because after all is said and done with the Old Man, the game immediately resets your name back to whatever is stored on Cinnabar Island (who wants to open the pause menu after the tutorial, only to see they've been renamed "OLD MAN"?). And again, Cinnabar Island's encounter data is set to be overwritten with whatever list was last used. So entering another route would reset Cinnabar Island from containing your name as a glitch Pokémon to, well, actual Pokémon. However, there are shore tiles in Cinnabar Island, which have the potential, if unintended, to call up wild Pokémon battles, those for tall grass, anyway—this was fixed completely in Pokémon Yolo with the game coded to blank out all possibility of encounters on those tiles, but shores have the capacity for encounters in the original duo of gaems. Again, this should not be a problem, not unless you have some way to jump around the game's maps… oh wait, you get one later in the game: a Hidden Machine by the name of "Fly"—capitalized "FLY" back then, I believe.

So, if you wait to do the tutorial until after you have a Pokémon who has learned Fly, you can fly straight to Cinnabar Island after the Old Man does the stuff with his raisins, and your name will still be stored in the shore encounters. Then, if you surf up and down the shores, you will see the meaningless, eldritchian… thing that your player's own name called up. It is a backwards-L shaped hunk of garbled pixels representing nothing in particular, and it is named "MISSINGNO.", thus being the monstrous, incomprehensible, pathetic and overwritten (and now effectively empty) husk of code where some of the Gen II Pokémon were once stored. And it will glitch out your sprites, at least temporarily… except for the Hall of Fame data, whether filled or not, which will stay screwed up. Forever.

But hey, at least you get some items duplicated a billion times.

Somehow.