soft corruptor
when i was in the 3rd grade
i convinced my friend's older sister to loan me her gameboy color
with pokemon blue
on the one condition
that i never save over her file.
this was contraband; my parents couldn't know
i smuggled that gameboy home and kept it inside my pillowcase, turning it on
at an almost imperceptible volume
after i’d been put to bed for the night.
i would play until the batteries died or i fell asleep or it was time for school
whatever came first.because of my promise to never save, i had, generally, somewhere between 6 and 10 hours to beat the game
that year, the margins of my schoolwork filled with (what i would later learn were) 'speedrun strats'
i wrote down what patch of grass would come up with a pikachu
traced my routes through the caves
memorized the dialog,
then the buttons to skip through it
learned i could invert the screen and navigate dark caverns without teaching my pokemon "flash"
eventually, i didn't need to invert anything
i just knew where to walk, in the dark.i was angling for the elite four, the ostensible win condition of pokemon
but i often stopped at cinnabar island
this is because if you surfed up and down the coastline off cinnabar
you might meet MissingNo.
missingno is a data buffer glitch, and a famous one at that
it appears when the game mistakenly substitutes the player's name as a pokemon id
forming a scrambled, glitchy block described as a "bird/normal" pokemon
(although occasionally appearing as a ghost or a fossil unseen elsewhere in the game)
summoning a ghost was reason enough to try for missingno, but it also came with side-effects
(including a useful error that would copy an item 128 times over)
but rumor was, catching missingno was dangerous-
it could softlock the game.
destroy your save file.
delete pokemon out of your party.none of this was true, but we traded these stories around the playground, whispered about our angry ghosts
and there were other phantoms;
invisible computers
a teleporting man stuck on roof
swapped overworld tiles
a trick to catch the most elusive pokemon of all, mew
a way to visit glitch city
glitch city was a place made of scrambled sprites
where menu items and objects and sections of buildings melted into one another
forming an ornate, broken map
you could stand in glitch city, but you couldn't move
i tried everything, every button press order and screen inversion and quit-restart scenario
stuck on a single tile, the character walked morosely as if into a wall
but it was still, materially there
i could see it
just beyond my reach
