A Bug May Be Responsible
But whereas Nintendo makes active choices to make Pokemon a little darker, the 'Lost Silver' myth may actually have been born in part by some of the bugs that plagued the early Pokemon games.
'Pokemon Red/Blue' is particularly infamous for the presence of "" ("Missing Number"), an error handler that appears in-game as a pillar of garbled pixels. The MissingNo bug can be exploited to replicate rare items — but it can also damage or crash the game, which makes it helpful as well as sinister.
