Like No One Ever Was
The hacker subculture of Pokemon speedrunning
By yaboyhud
“Take this, take this, it’s good for you!” The word was out. Children everywhere were beefing up their Pokemon artificially with drugs like an illegal steroid ring. My own starting six were all maxed out due to a constant diet of infinite Rare Candies and Calciums. No wild Pokemon was safe from my never-ending supply of Master Balls. Someone from little School 18 in Troy, NY had gotten wind of something called Missing No. How it worked, nobody knew. But it was slowly disseminated in whispers during class, lunch and after school. “You hafta talk to the Old Man…Where?…In Viridian City you dummy…Oh, then what?…Surf up and down the east shore of Cinnabar for a while and then you’ll see it…See what?…Missing No.!
It was a phenomenon that needed to be seen to be believed. Pokemon was everywhere. The little Pocket Monsters could be found on television, on lunch boxes, in candy, even on disposable birthday tableware. Now twenty years later, Pokemon has adapted well, offering the first truly AR game alongside an artsy live-action Super Bowl commercial. Now that the generation whose education growing up included catching Pokemon is finally reaching maturity in their twenties, our definition of play has evolved.
For many children, the Game Boy was their first exposure to a computer. Complicated, adult-sounding concepts such as persistent storage and networking were introduced innocently within Pokemon as Bill’s PC and trading Kadabras into Alakazams. Typing, commands, and the abstraction of controls became second nature. Unbeknownst to children and parents at the time, the first roots of hacking were also beginning to take hold as well. Pokemon was a game, and that meant the rules could be broken.
Computer “hacking” has now become a well-recognized skill in today’s society as demonstrated by the popularity of cryptography, deep web, and computer science in general. As more and more of the world is dominated by software automation, an ability to navigate the highly dense system and get to what one needs efficiently is incredibly important. As the original author of the Perl programming language stated, the three virtues of a good pro-gamer are laziness, impatience, and hubris. The two objectives of Pokemon are to beat the Elite Four, and to “catch ’em all”. So when most children around the world were walking back and forth through patches of grass, the hackers were all surfing.
Underneath the pixels and sounds of Pokemon are simple electric potentials of 0's and 1's, where the Missing No. cheat goes to work. During a talk with the Old Man, the game temporarily stores your name starting from the same memory address that is used to calculate Pokemon encounters. It is the only time in the game where your name is manipulated in this way and the programmer responsible was probably unaware of the consequences when he was deciding what to do with this one-of case. It soon became the unique touchpoint where hordes of impatient, lazy, and proud children found their shortcut. When the Old Man scene is done, the game gives you back your name and resets the memory address where it was located, but not what follows. Combined with some wacky terrain where the game doesn’t quite know where you are, Pokemon encounters start becoming very strange. From lvl 255 Pokemon that can be knocked out in one hit to cryptic flickering bars of pixels, curious boys unknowingly found something both interesting and fun that was math-related, but wasn’t multiplication tables.
When a player knocked out a Missing No, the sixth item in the player’s backpack would be glitched to be constantly 128. This meant that the Missing No. cheat effectively allowed the gamer to have infinite items, and by proxy, infinite lvl 100 Pokemon, infinite money, and 100% catch rate on all Pokemon via infinite Master Balls. As soon as you performed the cheat, the game as it was intended to be played by the developers was made instantly trivial. In school, boys were just boys, but in the digital world of Kanto, they were gods.
How somebody originally found the cheat is probably never going to be clear. But with modern technology twenty years later, the Missing No. cheat, along with many other hacks, is fully explained on underground forums, creating an entire glitching subculture. Players, now with a taste of the power hacking provided, started sharing all sorts of innovative methods to manipulate the very fabric of the Pokemon game. And since the Missing No. cheat ostensibly ended the game once you performed it, the game became one of speed.
It seems that with anything video-game related, it always comes back to one of several classic games. In the case of playing through an entire game for time, history points to the classic shooters Doom and Quake. Unlike many other games at the time, both Doom and Quake allowed the player to save their playthrough and share their playback with others, effectively open-sourcing the run so others could stack up and compete. And to compete, players of Doom and Quake started pushing the boundaries of what was considered fair. For example, rocket-jumping, now a common tactic in most FPS’s, was one of the OG hacks discovered by clever players. By abusing the in-game physics engine and shooting a rocket while simultaneously jumping, the player was able to reach places that otherwise would have needed a key or would have required some tangential objective to be completed, drastically shortening play times.
Nintendo, as always, also pioneered the practice of playing through a game as fast as possible: by rewarding speedy gamers with one of the most base rewards known to man, sex. Metroid, intended as a cross between the platforming style of Mario and the open-world adventuring style of Zelda, became the first game to popularize varied endings based on time and completion percentage. Metroid was also one of the first game series to favor heavy non-linear gameplay. There were many different paths to completing the game, depending on the items you had available at the time, and gamers could replay the game over and over to clock faster times, trying different combinations of items. The faster your time, the less Samus would be wearing at the end of the game. The original game from 1986 featured five (count ’em 5!) different endings, and to see the big reveal that Samus was in fact a lady, the player needed to complete the entire game in under 3 hours. You want to see her in just a bra and panties? Try beating the game in under an hour.
As speed gaming became more and more competitive, instead of bending the rules, players started breaking them. The very best gamers, by virtue of having executed the same moves hundreds and thousands of times, began finding various bugs and glitches. For example, in Ocarina of Time, Link normally can’t reach the Master Sword as a kid without first obtaining the three Spiritual Stones. But because the Master Sword room is generated when the player walks in the Temple of Time, a clever player can utilize cleverly timed pauses and back jumps to glitch through the closed doors and reach the sword. Mario 64 can be cheated in a similar way that allows the player to reach Bowser without having to collect the requisite number of stars. For a simple 8 bit Game Boy game such as Pokemon, the game could be “beaten” in under 5 minutes by doing a clever bit of math, and writing machine code.
Games Done Quick is a series of charity video game marathons, featuring players playing through games as quickly as possible, governed only by the rules of electromagnetism and mathematics. Tune in and you’ll see Toad literally flying through laps around the Star Cup in under 10 seconds, Link bombing himself to reach hidden dungeon rooms, and of course, infinite Rare Candies. The players call themselves speedrunners, and their goal is to beat the game faster than anybody has ever before.
Speedrunners thrive on anomalies, one-of, this-can-never-happen situations. While pushing a popular game like Pokemon to the limit, speedrunners found over 70 explicit glitches for the original game. The glitches include moving through walls, fusing Pokemon’s stats/moves, and generating cute lvl 7 Mew’s for you to catch. But we’re talking about hackers here. Speedrunners eventually discovered that a player could literally “jack into the Matrix” and execute arbitrary assembly from inside the game. These were the kind of cheats that will shave off not just minutes, but entire hours. Instead of playing the game, players could now simply warp to the Hall of Fame.
>sudo roll credits
When the Missing No. cheat first came out, it seemed innocuous. It was what every kid wanted: level 100 Pokemon, infinite Master Balls, etc. But recall the old saying, “be careful what you wish for”. As people started battling each other, it was discovered that Pokemon whom were trained the old-fashioned way were consistently stronger than the roided up Pokemon. It turns out that giving your Pokemon Rare Candies literally only raised their level by one. The reason was that the developers of Pokemon wanted to ensure that there was a difference in power between raised and caught Pokemon, so they instituted a hidden system called the “effort value” system, or EV for short. Pokemon that actually went through the training of battling other Pokemon always ended up with higher stats than one that cheated.
Pokemon was full of hidden gems like the Effort Value system that made the game rewarding as well as realistic. In addition to the EV system, the developers also created a system to increase the variance of wild Pokemon called Individual Values, or in other words, Pokemon genes. The same Pokemon trained the exact same way for Effort Values could still end up having very different stats given their innate IV’s. Tempted by this amount of depth, passionate players soon were diving into the plumbing of the game, and came up with a way to execute code in the game through a shell called the backpack.
This momma of all cheats is harmlessly named 8F. It involves glitching the game so that an item appears in your backpack which, when invoked, executes code depending on the subsequent order of items. After generating the 8F item, and “bootstrapping” the program with specific Pokemon in your party at specific HP levels or with specific moves, the player can make the game execute specific opcodes based on different combinations of items. With enough items, the player can actually make the game read items continuously, enabling the player to run their own homebrew software.
For example, one can write a script in Pokemon that generates all 151 Pokemon encounters out of thin air and “catches them all” with Master Balls. Alternatively, the player can walk on water, set or unset Pokemon Badges, or simply end the game. Picture a massive wall with switches for toggling every Pokemon, every move, every item, and every building warp. Slowly, the data structures in the original Pokemon games were explored and the entire game was mapped. Speedrunners finally reached the end.
…Spearows…! Do you know who I am? I am Ash, from the town of Pallet! I am destined to become the world’s number one Pokemon Master. I can’t be defeated by the likes of you…I am going to capture and defeat you all! You hear me? Come and GET ME!
As children, moments are fleeting and it seems like there is always something better to be had on the horizon. Young gamers moved on from the original Pokemon games to much bigger things to worry about like high school and girls. Subconsciously though, the gameplay from those digital journeys translated into tangible experience in the real world. Just look for all the Pokemon and gaming t-shirts at tech it-companies Facebook and Google. The little friends in our pocket always remain however, no matter how far we travel or how busy our lives become. They are simply satisfied, sleeping, waiting, perhaps for someone different to come along and start a new game.
