Don't even need a new game. You could clone pokemon by turning the game off mid-trade. My school had a kid that got a Mew from an event, then cloned it for everyone who wanted one.
It became possible in GSC to clone with a single cart. Switch boxes and time a restart correctly during the save and bingo bango, you have a cloned pokemon with whatever item it was holding.
This was awesome for getting extra Master Balls and Rare Candies.
You could clone items in the original games too iirc you would go swimming somewhere near cerulean city and keep going back and forth over the same spot and I think it would buffer overflow the item count for a certain slot in your backpack with a nearly infinitely high number.
If you're talking about the missingno glitch, you'd add 128 to the item count of your 6th item. This had the added bonus of potentially triggering an overflow if you already had 126 or more items there.
Yup, go to coffee guy who shows you how to catch Pokémon, fly to Cinnabar Island and go straight right, surf and swim up and down without leaving the shore, enjoy scrambled encounter data
Some nerdy kid at my school was selling printouts of how to do that. I didn't like him so when I heard about it I just printed a bunch out at the library and started giving them away. He got a couple of his friends together and they jumped me coming in from recess. I was laying on the ground just like ".... seriously, you want to fight me over that?"
When I was like 12 I caught a ditto in the Mewtwo cave and use it to lower the Mewtwo's health. Except it turns out the main attack of Mewtwo can one shot the Mewtwo and I hadn't saved in forever. I was so devastated.
I think many people figured out the Missingno shoreline kept some form of "last encounter table" in it, so I wouldn't be surprised some people may have tried to go there right after Mewtwo to chance themselves at more.
Unfortunately we do have that info nowadays, and we know that doesn't work.
Not to mention that useful information was harder to find and more difficult to verify, especially for niche technical topics like the inner workings of specific games.
In 99 we only had crappy dialup and I didn't really know how to browse the web, even if I sort of understood the basics (and I would have been six, admittedly). My dad would look up cheat codes at work for games I was playing and download the Web page onto a floppy drive to bring home to me. It was wild times.
That to say, the infrastructure was all there, but it's hardly guaranteed as a kid that you're browsing the web and know where to find all the best glitches.
hardly guaranteed as a kids that your browsing … would know where to find the best glitches?
You are were 6. You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.
Game related glitches and codes and walkthroughs are EXACTLY what kids were using for the internet for back then. I’m not arguing everyone had access to this, but please remember how this discussion started. Someone claimed 1999 was pre internet, which is insane.