8 Video Games That Reward You For Breaking Them

Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow's “Missingo” glitch involves the appearance of a mysterious fragmented Pokémon, and can be used to multiply items and spawn more powerful monsters.

While Missingo might be incredibly famous, few people actually know what exactly causes it. It wasn't just placed there as a neat little easter egg – it involves seriously screwing with the game's code. In order to trigger it, a player must chat to the Old Man in Viridian City, allow him to teach you how to catch Pokemon then immediately fly to Cinnabar Island, surfing on one specific patch of water.

Oh, and you've got to make sure your in-game player name contains certain letters in the right place, too.

Essentially what's happening, is because the game uses variables to the power of two to refer to specific Pokemon, and because there are only one-hundred and fifty-one of them in the game, the first usable variable that accounts for every Pokemon is two-hundred and fifty-six, leaving a huge number of empty variables to mess around with. Should one of these empty variables be triggered, it'll throw up Missingo, which is short for “missing number”.

By chatting to the old man and surfing on one specific piece of sea, players can force the game to spawn the blank variables, using the encounter to endlessly multiply the best items in the game.