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The infamous Pokémon MissingNo is not supposed to exist, it's a programming glitch and was never intended to be in the game. That being said there are no mistakes, just happy accidents, something like that anyway. Is MissingNo acknowledged as existing as part of the lore? I think that would be interesting, personally.

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MissingNo. is not a Pokémon, it's not something that was never intended to be in the game. It is random data found in memory that is misread by the game, which believes a Pokémon should be there.

Nintendo's customer service for the GameBoy has a specific section about MissingNo., which says the following:

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 Fight Safari Zone Pokémon trick.

To fix the scrambled graphics, try releasing the MissingNo Pokémon. If the problem persists, the only solution is to re-start your game. This means erasing your current game and starting a brand new one.

Even Nintendo calls it just a "programming quirk", it is not an entity whose "canonicity" can be confirmed or denied.

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  • It's an entity that exists because of a programming quirk (their PR friendly name for glitch). However, that doesn't mean that they couldn't look at this thing they accidentally created and somehow incorporate it into the lore. It wouldn't be the first time a creative work had a mistake be explained into canon later. It wouldn't be completely like turning a bug into a feature. Kind of like how they had to make up an explanation for why you can hear things in space in Star Wars, it was an oversight that they created new lore to explain.
    – Levi C. Olson
    Feb 21, 2020 at 18:10
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    On a side note, the second paragraph in the quote is actually completely wrong on both counts. Releasing MissingNo. doesn't do anything to fix the graphics, and you don't have to restart your game to fix them either (viewing any non-glitch Pokémon's details or Pokédex entry fixes it).
    – John Montgomery
    Feb 21, 2020 at 18:43

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