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Welcome to the #NoRuKo conference. We have a presentation on learning empathy from a bug. The speaker, Siân Griffin, is a former Rails committer and currently co-leads the team responsible for crates.io, the package repository for Rust.
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If you’ve never played with that, it can be quite interesting. I have some questions because I come from an older generation. I wondered how this relates to Pokémon Blue. It's known that you can make mistakes, but you can also do really well. However, I have found that Pokémon is both singular and plural.
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This talk is quite substantial, and I hope to share some insights today.
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Hello everybody, my name is Siân Griffin. I was hoping that there would be a Zubat emoji for you all to spam in chat, but unfortunately, there isn’t. There will be a point during my talk when you will know it's time, so please share all the pictures of Zubats with me.
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Text encoding can be challenging, and sometimes my name is spelled differently. My pronouns are they/them. Now let's talk about Pokémon.
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The first Pokémon game was developed by a small team for Japanese audiences. Released in 1996, Pokémon Red and Green were created on a tiny budget by a programming team of just four people. Their sales exceeded expectations, leading to an updated version that would soon follow. Following the hype, Pokémon Red and Blue were released worldwide in 1998, forming what would become the highest-grossing media franchise of all time, even surpassing icons like Mickey Mouse and Hello Kitty.
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Even if you’ve never played Pokémon, you might have seen Pikachu, the most famous Pokémon. But there was also a close second: Missingno. Missingno is a glitch Pokémon encountered exclusively through a glitch. Despite being a bug, it was well-known; in fact, 87% of players were aware of it back in the day, with many hearing about it through word of mouth rather than the internet.
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Missingno could duplicate items, which made it particularly appealing. The glitch had various names—some referred to it as the Missingno glitch, while others called it the item duplication glitch. At my school, it was commonly known as the Rare Candy glitch since players primarily used it to duplicate Rare Candies, which made Pokémon more powerful and thus highly desirable.
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To execute the glitch, we start in Viridian City, one of the earliest areas in the game. We talk to an old man and tell him we’re not in a hurry, which kicks off a tutorial showing how to catch Pokémon. After a Weedle appears, we skip the rest of the tutorial since we need to travel to Cinnabar Island.
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Using the fast travel system, we can ‘turn into a bird’ and fly to our destination. After landing, we’ll navigate through water tiles, which involves transforming into a seal-like creature—90s game mechanics were certainly unusual. As we explore this coast, we'll encounter wild Pokémon, and this is where the fun begins. Here, we come across our friend Missingno, who is level 168, much higher than the normal maximum level of 100.
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We quickly run away and check our inventory. I had four Rare Candies before the glitch, but somehow the glitch transformed that into 128 Rare Candies! It's curious how part of the display showed a flower, rendering 13, which resulted from the glitch giving me 128.
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If you've never seen this glitch before, it may seem like a random sequence of events leading to such a specific outcome. However, there are multiple bugs at play, and many of these aren’t really bugs at all; they are just properties of the code being utilized in unexpected ways.
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I should clarify that while I have not worked on this game nor interviewed those who did, I have spent considerable time analyzing the game’s disassembly. Through this process, we can infer the programmer's original intentions while also considering the constraints they faced.
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Let's delve into this glitch in more detail. You might be asking why we specifically visit that peculiar coast tile. The game operates on a grid system, so when the player occupies a tile, they technically occupy four sub-tiles. The upper left corner of the tile corresponds to coordinates (8, 8), while the bottom right corner is (9, 9).
