A Pokemon fan has created a piece of art demonstrating what MissingNo could look like as a real Pokemon, and it's rather horrifying to look at. The creative concept takes inspiration from MissingNo's original appearance in Pokemon Red and Blue, but changes it into a biological organism.
Pokemon's MissingNo is one of the biggest curiosities in the original Pokemon Red and Blue games. While MissingNo glitches have been found in more than just those two games, the original "Pokemon" that started it all led to all kinds of urban legends, confusion, duplicated items, and glitchy save files. Perhaps due to its mysteriousness and notoriety at the time, MissingNo remains memorable for many fans who grew up with the classics.
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Pokemon Fan Turns MissingNo Into a Real Pokemon
Over on Reddit, user rc1246 has shared their version of the original Pokemon Red and Blue MissingNo, turning the glitchy sprite into a real Pokemon. The result is arguably horrifying, almost looking like a Ditto that got caught between numerous different Pokemon transformations. Although the Pokemon retains the general shape of MissingNo, a lot of extra details have been filled in based on the original sprite. For example, the "mouth" visible on the MissingNo sprite now appears to be part of a Gengar face, complete with its iconic wicked grin.
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That's just one of the many Pokemon parts that make up the MissingNo design that can be spotted. Lickitung's tongue can be seen towards the bottom right, Raticate's teeth are set in the center of the Pokemon, with a Magikarp mouth visible near it. One can also spot what appear to be the eyes of Kabuto, a Psyduck eye with its three little hairs above it, and a Jigglypuff curl, to name just a few. In all, the creation is rather revolting to look at, with some fans joking that the artist never should have posted the image, or that the Pokemon should be "killed with fire" because it's so disturbing.
In general, though, fans seem to be quite positive about the prolific Pokemon fan artist's latest work. Several said that they'd never considered MissingNo looking anything like this, and hadn't seen any artist depictions similar to it, either. When asked about how many Pokemon made up the design, the artist noted that they believed they'd put about 20 different Pokemon parts into it, but due to similarities between some Pokemon's designs, they weren't entirely sure.
Officially, MissingNo exists because of a bug in the original games' code. After players follow the sequence of events to cause MissingNo to appear, the game tries to generate a Pokemon with an invalid identifier. The result is a sprite that scrambles together other images and Bird-typing that doesn't exist in the game. When encountered, captured, or stored on a PC, game glitches can result, but many players chose to purposefully encounter it anyway, as encountering MissingNo would cause items in the player's inventory to be duplicated. It was often used as a method of replicating valuable or rare items, like the Master Ball, which typically can only be found and used once in Pokemon Red and Blue.
Though MissingNo was never intended to be a thing and Nintendo advised players against trying to encounter it back in the day, it's subsequently become one of the most notorious glitches ever in gaming. The complex method of getting MissingNo to spawn likely also helped a lot of other Pokemon urban legends to thrive, which typically included a long list of convoluted steps to follow, which would supposedly reward the player with Pokemon like Togepi if done correctly. While there are some other valid glitches in the game, including one to get Mew in Pokemon Red and Blue, many more were purely lies intended to waste players' time.