The errors and glitches in the original Pokémon Red/(Green or Blue depending on your region) are well worn territory. Missingno. is just the tip of the iceberg; moves don’t work right or randomly fail under certain circumstances, if they don’t run contrary to the developer’s intentions entirely. About 99.9 % of the Mew population in Red/Blue/Yellow is the result of a cloning glitch or the ability to spawn any encounter in the game. Glitch City is the game’s 12th city, and I never bothered with the Safari Zone outside of Surf and Strength once I figured out I could spawn the encounters off the coast of an island.

But before the good Pokémon games came out on the GBA, I was always paranoid about playing a Game Boy Pokémon game because of five simple words:

I am a serial restarter of Pokémon games: in 2014, I beat X version with entirely teams composed of all 18 of the game’s types. In 1999, I had a good run that ended up with the diploma, so I sent my brother the rare stuff to hold on to and re-rolled. I did the work to get all three starters on my game, and had just rolled Brock when I put the game down for a bit. I picked it up later, and that message was waiting for me before the dreaded “NEW GAME” and “OPTIONS” screen.

I don’t recall playing as much after that.

But what it did do was get me to go online with our brand-spanking new dialup connection to figure out just what in Amber’s name happened to my file. That led me to a little place called GameFAQs, which had a guide that mentioned abusing Missingno could have repercussions beyond the existing file having a screwed up Hall of Fame. I made sure to limit my Missingno exposure after that.

Finding GameFAQs led me to discover in late 1999 that they had guides for a Pokémon game that wasn’t coming out in North America for a year. My hype for that saw me hit the message boards, which began a long string of board hopping until I found my way to a little site called Nintendo World Report. So Pokémon is responsible for me being here today, and I’m thankful for it.

But I still want a third version of X and Y mainly because I want to use Yveltal and the one I have in my file I won’t restart was kinda bad. Here’s hoping I get some good news on the 27th.