Take a wrong step at the edge of a carefully curated virtual world and you find a digital ghost: a scrambled block of static that showers you with infinite riches while threatening to corrupt your save file. This episode unpacks MissingNo, the anomaly buried in the code of the 1996 release of Pokémon Red and Blue, drawing on game histories, sociological research, and vintage strategy guides. The hosts walk through the Old Man glitch step by step: watch the tutorial in Viridian City, immediately use Fly to Cinnabar Island, then Surf along a single line of pixels on the eastern coastline until the game throws you into a battle with Pokédex entry 000, known in Japanese as Ketsuban, or missing number.

They explain the mechanics behind the magic. The Game Boy stashed your player name in the wild encounter data buffer during the tutorial, and because Cinnabar’s coastline was never assigned encounter data, the game tried to build a monster out of your name’s text, dragging up the deleted Bird type and multiplying whatever sat in your sixth inventory slot by 128. Nintendo Power called it a programming quirk in May 1999 and warned players away, but kids ignored the warnings and charged up to 200 dollars on playgrounds to perform it. Nintendo left it intact in the 2016 3DS Virtual Console re-release.

• Why the game refused to crash and instead stitched together a digital Frankenstein from garbage data
• How the glitch corrupted the Hall of Fame and what it meant to lose 50 hours of progress
• The magic circle, and why breaking the illusion made players love the game more rather than less
• Fan theories tying MissingNo to Kangaskhan and Cubone, and the concept of subversive play
• How MissingNo seeded speedrunning and glitch-hunting communities and lives on in Vampire Survivors and The Binding of Isaac