Everything Pokémon: Pokémon Facts Book 2

Pokemon Creepypasta #5

Glitchett

Do you remember when you first discovered glitches in Pokémon?

I remember when I did. Summer, 1999, at Kingswood Summer Club. Pokémon Red and Blue was released the previous year, which I guess would make me eight or nine. The Pokémon craze was in full swing over here in the UK — every day, I packed up my Pikachu-yellow Gameboy Colour with Pokémon Red permanently slotted into its top. My friends and I would get together with our link cables for epic trading and battling sessions that lasted for the whole day, or until our parents came to pick us up.

Around mid-summer, our 'group' was starting to feel like we'd seen it all and done it all. Sure, I didn't think we’d ever caught 'em all — back then, it seemed like an impossibility. We had grinded to level 100, eliminated the Elite 4 more times than we could remember. The game was starting to lose its draw, and there were still four long weeks of summer left. Then, we saw Missingno.

I remember the first kid I knew to have him; he told us that his brother showed him how to catch this super rare, super awesome Pokémon. We gathered round as he revealed that Pokémon to us — that magical, distorted, reverse 'L' shape that held the key to infinite Rare Candies. We were all instantly in love and dying to get one of these rare Pokémons for ourselves, so he passed on the secret and showed us how.

Within the next few days, our little group was hooked on glitches. We scoured magazines for the latest bugs and tricks — we visited Glitch City, battled all kinds of high level Pokémon off the coast of Cinnabar; we even caught Mew.

But there was one glitch which I've never been able to find record of since. Funnily enough, I can't remember the details of how to pull it off, but I remember the outcome — Glitchlett. The technique for finding this little guy followed the pattern of a lot of the tedious Pokémon encounter bugs in Red and Blue — talk to this dude, fly to this place; it might have had something to do with Celadon, I'm not sure really.

Glitchlett was just as you'd expect — a glitched-up Diglett. The sprite was mostly intact, but the face was distorted, Missingno.-style. There were a few distorted lines through it, like scan lines, and the cry was a little weird too, although I can't put my finger on what it was. His level was never visible, but we guessed it must have been over 100, as we could hardly put a mark on him while trying to catch him. Most of us resorted to one of out many cloned Masterballs.

We nicknamed him Glitchlett, and that night we were eagerly trying out what his guy could do.

The next day, we all met up to compare results; by this point we all considered ourselves Pokémon glitch experts. Experiences with Glitchlett were varied — one guy claimed it messed up his game so bad he couldn't play anymore and had had to reset. Others said they tried to battle with Glitchlett only to find the game crashed every time they tried. I had the most luck in battles with the new glitch Pokémon. His only move was DIG, and he couldn't learn any HMs or TMs, even those you'd expect a Diglett to be able to learn. Against Wild Pokémon, Glitchlett was a powerhouse — he never lost PP, and together we'd OHKO'd every Pokémon we came across.

But the attack itself was... odd. It took two turns as usual, but after the first turn he'd be hit with some kind of self-damaging recoil. There was no explanation other than "Diglett was hurt!" and that strange cry, but it never made much of a mark on him. Glitchlett's HP was higher than anything I'd ever seen, and because it took only one DIG to destroy any wild Pokémon, it was never much of a problem. I laid waste to my friend's teams during linked battles, and he soloed the Elite 4.

I remember when things got even stranger. I was levelling a team using the Exp. All — destroying wild Pokémon with Glitchlett seemed the obvious choice and I'd maxed many Pokémon this way in the past. I'd woken up early that morning to level especially, and had spent all day KO'ing wild Pokémon. At that moment I was under my bed covers with my trusty Gameboy Colour light — Mum would go mad if she knew I wasn't asleep at this time. Everything was going to plan and my new team was levelling up beautifully. I must have been concentrating pretty hard, because it was too late when I noticed how low Glitchlett's health had become. I selected DIG for the final time and watched him begin to descend into the ground... as expected, I received the message "Diglett was hurt!". I heard that piercing cry, louder then before, and my stomach turned as I watched his health bar slide towards zero. The bar doubled back on itself, and seemed to empty four or five times before Glitchlett repeated his dying cry — now a horrible noise.