When I activated the 0x1636 glitch using a GameShark, my Game Boy Advance screen flickered. The usual battle music warped into a low, humming drone. And there it stood on the virtual grass of Route 1: a Squirrel. Not a Pikachu. Not a Sandshrew. A pixelated, orange-furred squirrel with a single stripe down its back and eyes that glowed like embers. Its Pokédex entry, a garbled mess of Japanese characters and English phonemes, read: “This Pokémon fled the burning forests of 1636. It hides in the time-between-frames. It knows only the move ‘Ember Cache.’”
The fan community, upon learning of my discovery via a long-defunct Geocities forum, went wild. Theories exploded. Some claimed that “1636” was a nod to the year of the first recorded forest fire in Japanese history (which is historically inaccurate—the first major recorded fire was in 1657, the Great Meireki Fire, but the fanatics rounded down). Others argued it was a developer’s inside joke: a tribute to a childhood pet squirrel that had chewed through a power cord and fried a development kit in October 1636 of the Japanese calendar? That made no sense, but the internet loved it. 1636 pokemon fire red squirrels
Why does it matter? Because every time you play FireRed and walk through the tall grass of Route 1, the game’s RNG cycles through 1,500 possible encounter slots. Slot 1636 is empty. But for a single frame, the game almost looks there. If you press A at the exact moment the frame hits, the screen will flash orange for a millisecond. That is the FireRed Squirrel. It is not a Pokémon. It is a memory of a memory—a burnt acorn stored in a tree hollow that no longer exists, in a forest that burned down three hundred and seventy years before the first Pokémon game was ever conceived. When I activated the 0x1636 glitch using a