APE learned TOOLS! What? APE is evolving! APE evolved into MANKIND!
Glitches have been a thing in games ever since their conception. Some are bad, some are merely annoying, some are a funny exploit to show to friends but some-some are the stuff legends are made out of. Of course in recent times as the internet has become what it is, these fall more and more to a thing of the past. Flaws that get patched out with updates or exploits used by speed runners to decrease their time, but back in the day? Mysteries abounded and glitches were our own urban legends! How to unlock Luigi in Super Mario 64, surfing to the truck and pushing it with Strength to get Mew! It was the wild west of gaming with rumors and dead ends existing around every turn. For my money though, nothing will ever be as legendary as "Missingno."
Back when Pokemon was fresh and new our feeble child brains clung so hard to the vague speculations that there could be more than just the 151 we knew. Nowadays as we near 1000 Pokemon that's kind of a laughable concept, especially as most of us have just grown weary of it at this point. Back then though, our imaginations were running wild with what else could be out there... and then it happened! Someone found it. The fabled "152nd" Pokemon, and what made it even better? It was easy to find! It was like a Mew that we could all obtain. Sure it could corrupt your save data, but who cared? We had all played through Red/Blue more then once by that point and who could pass up using this weird new jumble of pixels? It was a brand new legend in the making, and everyone wanted a piece of it.
Of course these days we know Missingno. is nothing more then tricking the game into loading something that isn't there, but at the time it was more then just a glitch. It was finding that proverbial gold at the end of a rainbow. It was validation for all the things we had speculated and while we didn't know WHAT it was, it was there and we could see it and use it and if I'm being honest, the fact that we didn't know what it was made it all the more alluring to us. It was the perfect culmination of everything Pokemon was. It was fun and mysterious, with just enough speculation to make it creepy in the best of ways. The kind of stuff that gets your inner child pumped on nostalgic vibes and isn't that just what Halloween is too? Maybe I'm waxing philosophical, but now you know how I could unironically add Missingno. into one of these countdowns~
