YouTube king PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, was nostalgic when he came across a meme about Nintendo’s 1990s gaming hit Pokemon, which turned into a cultural phenomenon and remains dear to millennials. In the video reviewing software failure memes, the YouTuber revealed a story about how a glitch in the game that confused him as a child - something that people who were kids at the time can easily relate to.
Reacting to a submission titled “the OG software gore” on a Reddit community that showed the so-called “MissingNo” glitch, he recalled a story that, he noted, zoomers would not understand. The vlogger admitted that although the name of the scrambled sprites bug clearly signalled that it was a glitch, it tricked his expectations when he was younger.
“There was this epic hidden Pokémon that you can find. I think it was a glitch. Like a Pokemon that was not added to the game. It was super overpowered as well if you caught it. It's called Missing Number. That didn't register for me as a kid. I was like OH MY GOD MISSINGNO!" he said.
As the online gaming den Dexerto points out, the source of PewDiePie’s confusion, MissingNo, really was a dual-type bird/normal Pokémon that blew up among gamers. Those who were lucky enough to catch the glitched sprite had the item in slot six duplicated to 128.