Pokemon finally acknowledges a decades-old glitch beloved by fans

It took nearly thirty years, but The Pokemon Company has referenced MissingNo with an official yet subtle nod in a YouTube video.

MissingNo is an infamous glitch Pokemon from Pokemon Red & Blue. It’s essentially a collection of data which is caused by spawning a Pokemon in an area with no wild encounter information. As such, it can cause issues with your game.

The fact that MissingNo results from a bug means that The Pokemon Company never references it in official materials outside of warning fans not to try and find it, especially as it’s still possible to summon MissingNo in the Nintendo 3DS ports of the Gen 1 games.

MissingNo’s time has finally arrived, as a new episode of the Beyond the Pokedex series on The Official Pokemon YouTube Channel references the infamous glitch Pokemon at several points, with the video suffering from pixelated technical faults that get acknowledged by the hosts.

The video is about Magmar, and it starts with Maple, one of the hosts, catching an unseen Pokemon on Cinnabar Island. In Pokemon Red & Blue, this is also where MissingNo can be found, and when Maple catches the Pokemon, the video starts glitching out.

Later, when Maple reveals Magmar’s Pokedex number, her co-host thanks her for helping him find the “missing number,” another reference to MissingNo.

Fans in the comments were ecstatic that MissingNo was hinted at. “I cannot believe an official Pokémon video made a reference to MissingNo,” one commenter wrote, while another said, “I appreciate the references to MissingNo. I would squeal like a little girl if it got added into a mainline Pokémon game.”

MissingNo has become a catch-all term for any visual hiccup in a Pokemon game, making it far more memorable than many of the official Pokemon in the series.

While it’s doubtful that MissingNo will ever be officially added to the games, it’s still heartwarming to see it get a shoutout in an official Pokemon YouTube video.