Pokemon: The Story Behind MISSINGNO.

Watch out for this huge wall of text behing the legacy that is MISSINGNO.

First of all, let's go over the colorful past of the Cubone!

   The story about Cubone is that he is a Kangaskhan baby who wears the skull of his dead mother. The marks on the skull are erosions from the Cubone's tears.

   Originally, Marowak (The evolved form of Cubone) was to evolve into a Kangaskhan. However, last minute decisions cut this from the original Pokémon games, and Kangaskhan was left as a Pokémon without a pre-evolution state. However, because this code was already within the game, the developers simply moved this code to an empty slot.

This became known as MISSINGNO.

To support this, try feeding a rare candy to MISSINGNO. It evolves into Kangaskhan!

Now, we'll go over the different forms of MISSINGNO.

Aerodactyl Fossil Form

Famous Pixel Form

Kabutops Fossil Form

 Scary Ghost Form 

(What was this originally planned for?)

   Every form of MISSINGNO. and its cousin M ', which only appears in pixel form, is a Bird/Normal type. Not flying, bird. These are the only two pokemon that have the bird type.

Nintendo has an official description of Missingno. listed in their Customer Service troubleshooting section:

"MissingNO is a programming quirk, and not a real part of the game. When you get this, your game can perform strangely, and the graphics will often become scrambled. The MissingNO Pokémon is most often found after you perform the Flight Safari Zone Pokémon trick [or Viridian Old Man trick]. To fix the scrambled graphics, try releasing the MissingNo Pokémon." 

Nintendo was incorrect on the method for fixing graphical issues; releasing Missingno. did not fix the graphics. The actual way to fix these issues is to view the Pokédex data or stat page of an official Pokémon.

Now, random fun facts:

• Missing NO's appearance in battles allows the item duplication glitch, which duplicates the sixth item in your bag to 128 or 255.
• Encountering Missingno. has been known to interfere with the save game data in various ways, such as adversely affecting the Hall of Fame saved data and (if its stats are viewed) messing with some graphics until the stats of a normal Pokémon are viewed. 

• Catching M': If you throw a pokeball at M ', most likely you will see something like this:

Your pokeball missed!

M ' was caught!

• And then you will continue to fight him. I know, weird. You can catch him again to get a level 0 or level 80 Ditto, or you can defeat it, and it will still be caught.

• Missingno. Yellow Version form is Normal/999, whereas Missingno. forms in Red and Blue Versions are Bird/Normal. It uses the palette of Pikachu, and so appears as a yellow and red glitched box. It also causes glitches that Missingno. in Red and Blue Versions did not. If caught, it will cause graphical glitches, possibly rendering the player invisible and making duplicates of the player and all other on-screen characters walk in random locations on the screen. Yellow form is exclusive to Yellow Version.
  
• This form does not appear through the Old man glitch, as the Old man glitch was removed in Yellow Version.
• This form appears through the Mew glitch with a special stat of 31, 32, 61, 62, 63, 67, 68, 69 or 86.

For more detailed information on Missingno., go to http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Missingno.

And stay tuned for yet another MISSINGNO. theory tommorow!