Pokemon Go glitch has trainers thinking they’re playing Minecraft

A Pokemon Go player has discovered a glitch that transforms Pokemon and Poke Balls into blocky nightmares that wouldn’t look out of place in Minecraft.

The Pokemon series is known for its bug, especially back in the days of Gen 1, when players could create MissingNo, the artificial Pokemon, from random data with a carefully planned bug glitch that involved traveling the Kanto region.

Nowadays, the Pokemon games can fix glitches via updates, though this isn’t a huge priority for the bugs in Pokemon Scarlet & Violet. This is a common occurrence for Pokemon Go, which receives regular updates, many of which address issues discovered by the players and the dev team.

One of the most common types of bugs involves visual quirks, especially as the game relies on the ever-shifting overworld background. These hiccups have led to humorous and freaky unintended changes to iconic Pokemon.

Niantic

Pokemon Go glitch makes the game look like Minecraft

A user on the Pokemon Go Reddit has uploaded a screenshot of a peculiar glitch in their game. This unintended change to the 3D models caused a Dratini and a Poke Ball to become pixellated, which resembles MissingNo slightly, if it were alive in Minecraft.

never had this glitch happen before
byu/graphyyyy inpokemongo

“Oh, man, Missingno.! Is it a Bird/Normal type with Water Gun and Sky Attack?” one user wrote, referring to a famous cut Pokemon type that was buried in the code of Gen 1 but could be accessed by creating a MissingNo.

“That’s the new PokemonXMinecraft crossover event we are not even supposed to know about yet,” another user wrote, while another said, “Maybe it’s Porygon preparing for the Porygon community day?”

This Minecraft-style glitch has happened ahead of the launch of the Pokemon Go Winter Holiday 2023 Part 1 event. This means more updates are on the way, so hopefully, a patch will be included to resolve this issue if more players encounter it.

While bugs like this might make Pokemon Go seem like a shoddy product, you must remember that millions of people worldwide play it daily. This means that strange, one-off visual quirks are possible, only never to be repeated, ensuring MissingNo doesn’t awaken from its tomb.