Inside the Bad Clone / Celebi glitch (Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal)

Channel:

Crystal_

Subscribers:

12,600

Published on February 21, 2014 2:19:36 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOJhDrye0z4

Game:

Pokémon Gold and Silver (1999)

Category:

Tutorial

Duration: 11:29

17,108 views

134

The bad clone trick or glitch, most commonly referred to as the Celebi glitch, is a glitch that was, to my knowledge, discovered around 8 years ago by Paco81. This trick allows, through the use of a bad clone (glitch Pokemon #000), to obtain any given Pokemon or item provided we have a pokemon with an attribute (or, for attributes that occupy more than a byte, a byte of said attribute) that shares the hexadecimal number with the item or Pokemon we want to acquire. The most famous version of this trick takes advantage of the index number of the move Beat Up (learned by Sneasel at level 57), sharing its index number with Celebi, in order to obtain the otherwise unobtainable legendary Pokemon.

http://www.pokemon-stats.com/foros/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=14334 (spanish)
http://glitchcity.info/wiki/index.php/Celebi_Trick (english)

When I first performed this trick in the Game Boy many years ago it was a very intriguing experience; just being able to flood the screen with '?' symbols and glitch everything up was awesome! I never actually used the trick to obtain Celebi (because heck, raising a Pokemon to level 57 can be a very tedious work!) but I did obtain other legendary Pokemon like Mewtwo via this trick. Anyway, the thing is that, be it because of nostalgia or for no particular reason at all, I decided to look at what goes behind the scenes when the trick is taking place, since all I've been able to find is tutorials that tell you how to perform the glitch, but there's nothing about why and how the glitch exactly happens. In particular, I wanted to follow very closely the process of how data is moved around -displaced-, since this is what makes the attributes of the Pokemon to be 'transformed' after all.

It's important to notice that what makes this trick work is the fact that we withdraw 'CANCEL' from the box. The bad clone is just the glitch that allows us to do that. If there was another way to withdraw 'CANCEL', the trick would work similarly.

The purpose of this is not to get Celebi, but I'm still using the team of four level 57 Sneasel so that things feel as familiar as possible to everyone. Anyway, in the video, this glitch will always be referred to as the Celebi trick, since it's its most generalized name.

Watch the video in full screen!

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