How Do Speedrunners Beat Pokemon Blue Backwards?

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Pokemon Generation 1 Speedruns are wild. Especially this one where they get all of the badges in reverse.
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Special thanks to Stocchi for his run, help, and telling me how to say his name correctly:
‪@stocchi5177‬
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Resources:
Pokemon Red/Blue Reverse Badge Acquisition Leaderboard:
www.speedrun.c...
Pokemon Routes:
pokemon-speedr...
Generation 1 Glitches:
glitchcity.wik...
Brock Through Walls:
glitchcity.wik...
Brock Through Walls Explained:
tasvideos.org/...
Gen 1 Expanded Item Pack:
glitchcity.wik...
Gen 1 Expanded Item Pack Documentation:
glitchcity.wik...)
Glitched Ditto Move:
glitchcity.wik...
Cooltrainer Gitch:
glitchcity.wik...)
0x50 Sub Tile:
glitchcity.wik...
Cooltrainer move glitch video example:
• Pokemon Blue: Catching...
Glitch City forums archives:
archives.glitc...
Hexadecimal Listing:
glitchcity.wik...
Stocchi's Manips logs explanation:
pastebin.com/Q...
RNG Manip FAQ
wiki.pokemonspe...
Item underflow item slots:
archives.glitc...
Disassembly of Red/Blue:
github.com/pre...
Red/Blue Memory values:
gamefaqs.games...
--------------------------
Music:
PMD Red Rescue Team - Mt. Blaze Peak
OneShot - On Little Cat Feet
Legend of Dragoon - Royal Castle
VVVVVV - Predetermined Fate
CrossCode - Temple of Thunder
FFX - Beyond The Darkness
MMBN 3 - Internet is Expanding
Last Bible III - Val Ship
Pokemon B/W - Critical Health
CrossCode - Rhombus Dungeon

[@DoctorSwellman]

Try out Brilliant for free for 30 days and level up your knowledge! If you go to brilliant.org/DoctorSwellman/, you will also receive 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription.

[@leonfire99]

I'm surprised the Zelda community calls the low optimized tool assisted runs LOTAD but not the pokemon community

[@golderzoa]

LOTAD was a term used later at that time period they were Called LOTAS They Changed it to LOTAD Later i'm unsure the origin of the term LOTAD. LOTAD wasn't a term used in 2014.

[@seifeir6951]

@@golderzoa lotad came out in 2002 I'll see myself out

[@k64speed]

LOTAS stands for "Low-Optimized Tool-Assisted Speedrun", while LOTAD stands for "Low-Optimized Tool-Assisted Demonstration", which would in theory have two different definitions and thereby two two different use cases. However, I don't know if the two are used interchangeably in reality.

[@yokoelfvganime8112]

The concept of having a bag that breaks reality when you change its content is quite cool actually

[@dr4gonblitz]

What you mean this is how I beat the game as a kid back in 1987 on my gameboy advance??

[@DoctorSwellman]

This truly is the byte of ‘87 that helped us beat the game back in the stone ages

[@belstar1128]

he time travelled and build his own game boy advance with 1987 technology but it used 1000000$ worth of parts and was as big has a house

[@Neceroe]

​@@belstar1128..... How bad do you think late 80's tech is lol

[@belstar1128]

@@Neceroe not good i think the gba may have been on par with one of those 100.000$ sun workstations .but you could make something on par with the original game boy for cheap since that came out in 1989. i overexaggerated the comment but maybe in 1980 a computer would have have to be that big. but the weird thing about 80s computers is that the most expensive ones had no graphics at all .just a terminal despite it have crazy amounts of ram and cpu power . so if you wanted to game you should have just gotten a c64. and its like comparing apples to oranges. like there is this youtube channel called Usagi electric that restores these big old computers from the 80s. but every time he turns them on. you find out that they are so simple you can't even move the cursor because the screen thinks its a printer .and then i wonder if the release year is even correct it seems like something from the 60s. but it had a lot of ram and storage and supports networking .

[@petercarioscia9189]

​@@belstar1128the first game boy was produced in 1989 and the only reason it didn't have color screen is because it would have required 2 additional AA batteries. Granted the technology in GBA was leaps and bounds ahead of the OG Gameboy, I wasn't JUST the full color display.

[@lordmarshmal_0643]

You can't just casually drop "level 127" in a Pokemon video like that I know that number's illegal by heart

[@nikoskonstantinidis4069]

hehe cheat pokemon got blood hands

[@gaminggoddess85]

I've been playing a lot of Pokemon Masters EX where the level cap is 150 so it didn't sound weird to me lol. But then I also already knew that the Missingno glitch can generate pokemon at that level.

[@dii3218]

OGs know the real LevelCap is 255

[@PataHikari]

When I saw a walk through walls exploit being mentioned I thought "Ah they use this glitch to get into Veridian Gym so they can start getting badges I was a fool. I forgot this is Gen 1 Pokemon

[@MrGillb]

exploiting buffer overflows normally -> "and through doing this sequence of packets sent to the server, we have the heap into a state such that the next allocation is under sized and we can use this to write into our fake object" average null pointer oob write exploiting buffer overflows in speedruns -> "we need ensure when we access the empty move that the room we're in has a tree in the middle of the screen and also that we have precisely 3 attack in this frame and also a hi-potion along with several cloned keycards" cracked out arcane statement, which makes sense at the moment but out of context is absolutely unhinged.

[@thebigbean8783]

"GeN 1 iS sO BroKeN" proceeds to manipulate the code to the point that's almost not possible with human inputs

[@JuiceboxTheShuckle]

I used to run this one for fun back when brock through wall was done with bulbasaur and a pidgey, it was the route where you defeat gym leaders with mewtwo from cerulean cave. pb was like 56 mins or something, I didn't do it often. but I did do it in red on an actual gbc and in blue on 3ds virtual console. I think my pkmn red cartridge still has the save from that first RBA run. loved the video man, brought back good memories.

[@leftysheppey]

MrWint has one of the most amazing TAS videos ive ever seen. Pokemon yellow ACE. Phenomenal TAS, and would highly recommend. Its only about 10 minutes long and youre really missing out if you haven't watched it

[@DoctorSwellman]

Vouch

[@DawnSRC]

Wow! This is an incredibly well done video. Haven’t seen much from this run before and despite some really complicated concepts I didn’t feel like it was overwhelming. Banger vid!

[@AronFigaro]

Whatever else massive props for using the Crosscode OST, that game is fucking incredible.

[@vincentsquared1304]

3:38 nice Oneshot music. Brings back memories

[@yukaiyami]

Oooooh! So that thing I did as a kid to copy Pokémon holding the masterball so id have tons of copies is called SRAM glitching! I learned something new today! :D

[@hotshowerh2o356]

uu AAA-re a very cool channel and I enjoy your videos.

[@freaquin]

swellman: "the first instances of routing RBA-" my stupid ass: wow i didn't know reverse bottle adventure was in pokemon red

[@piratebear3126]

When I was a kid playing with an Action Replay on Emerald I used a warp code to get to Birth Island and catch a Mew. Except I had just started the game so I was now stuck in the port city with a Mew and under-leveled Torchic. Did end up beating the game backwards for the most part, and it’s one of the most standout Pokemon runs I remember. Still have the Mew in Violet too.

[@holschermarc]

I know a few things about Gen1 inner working and how to fuck with it - but this made my head spin. I go to sleep now

[@whtiequillBj]

@16:52, is it possible to miss the level 127 Charazard due to the 1 in 256 glitch?

[@vaiyt]

The master ball completely bypasses the catch formula.

[@oro6399]

12:54 i misheard this as “this specific Sceptile”

[@tacotaco1111]

Hey now, do I hear Legend of Dragoon music in your Pokémon vid? Very nice.

[@gaminggoddess85]

Double points for being the best track on the OST, too.

[@TheSuperM101]

Great video!!! Keep it up dude!! ❤️❤️

[@Simipour1]

Enjoyed the video, the cooltrainer glitch video in the description doesn't link to anything though

[@DoctorSwellman]

I’ll see if I can fix this later!

[@WillowEpp]

If we're going to be technical anyway, then I'm going to point out that an overflow in the negative direction is still an overflow. Underflow refers to a specific floating point phenomenon that's completely unrelated to integer wraparound.

[@lilyyy411]

Actually the term "underflow" can be used to describe phenomenon and integer wrap around depending on context, although the floating point one is more common.

[@WillowEpp]

@@lilyyy411 I disagree. Just because someone co-opts a term of art doesn't mean it's right, and no one I've ever talked with in numerics has ever used it for integer overflow. I get that this is probably a losing battle because _language,_ but I still have to at least _try_ to prevent dilution of meaning in my profession. ┐⁠(⁠´⁠ー⁠｀⁠)⁠┌

[@Redmage913]

Nice use of the legend of dragoon soundtrack :)

[@appledumplin]

AAA OneShot music!!

[@nintendonerdjoseph]

I don't know why it's starting to bug me so much, but almost every video about these games feels the need to point out that the games are "extremely broken" which is just not exactly true. The vast majority of players playing the game in a regular way will not come across anything game-breaking. The game only becomes broken or "extremely broken" if you go out of the way to exploit the game by playing in an extremely unusual or intentional fashion. Anyway, enough rambling, great video! Super informative!

[@wingedmirage4226]

Seems the route has changed a lot since I saw GDQ run it

[@roobeedooo]

dope vid :D especially the visuals

[@IndyNDYT]

Legend of Dragoon music yesss

[@LRXC1]

This is an awesome video!!

[@sam-ej8oe]

Very nice. Way over my head

[@andrewv.9142]

I wonder if it's possible to do this starting from the Elite 4?

[@kritis167]

I'm a simple man. I hear The Legend of Dragoon, I like.

[@myhandleiswhat]

I'm pretty sure I, for fun, made a Pokemon's catch rate 0 by modifying game code and the master ball failed on it. I don't recall which generation I did that in. I just thought it was funny. Edit: Yeah, Charizard's catch rate is 45. If you make a Pokemon's catch rate 0 in the earlier gens, even the master ball will fail to catch it. That's why 3 is the lowest (Mewtwo and the birds and such)

[@Magikarpador]

damn you have a good taste in music

[@someguy325es]

Imagine if all this research and creativity were used for a constructive purpose

[@minirop]

VVVVVVery cool VVVVVVideo.

[@DoctorSwellman]

VVVVVV is such a good game

[@jackmatthews9637]

The title of this video is misleading, I expected them to be on a hacked version of the game where you actually fight Giovanni first and work back through the gyms

[@DoctorSwellman]

It’s really not. Giovanni is the first gym leader fought in the run. It just requires some setup to actually do it

[@twustermydude]

ONESHOT MUSIC!!!!!!!!!

[@luniveon]

May I ask why python, as a programmer myself, I’m kinda intrigued why people choose a language to learn.

[@belstar1128]

i am sure pretty much every man born between 1985 and 2000 that lived in a non impoverished country played this game and many women and younger and older people too at least once. combined with almost 30 years of hard core fans playing it almost every day this game has basically become some kind of coding sandbox were players can do pretty much everything you can do with a devkit but in a very clunky and tedious way. i think its probably possible with a lot of other games but since they don't have the enormous fanbase of Pokémon its unlikely or it will take another 30 years .

[@ovi-jade]

aayyyy down + b gang

[@toastymansabe]

Something about manifesting the gym leaders before you and transmutate Giovanni into a pc is so funny to me

[@mykal4779]

power move

[@luniveon]

⁠@@mykal4779showing Giovanni who the alpha person is

[@Kydrou]

You defeat Giovanni via Zoom call

[@innoc4063]

This run rules because by the end, it looks as if Red has rended the very fabric of reality while forcefully bringing every gym leader to his feet to have their teams wiped by an invincible dragon.

[@alexlamoureux1049]

I made a reverse badge acquisition TAS in 2011, with a total time around 2 hours. I didn't know that it's now a speedrun category!

[@thenoseguy]

Chat is this real

[@DoctorSwellman]

Do you have a link to the TAS? I couldn’t find anything before GZ’s LOTAS in my research sadly

[@alexlamoureux1049]

@@DoctorSwellman I'm trying to reply, but KZbin seems to be removing the Microstorage link. I found the original input file uploaded in 2010, and it's actually 96 minutes long. It beats the gyms in reverse order, then battles Professor Oak, then crashes the game. I'll add the link in another comment here.

[@placeholderplaceholder3448]

@@DoctorSwellman I can corroborate the existence of this, there's an old LP Archive listing for a SomethingAwful thread about the input file, and the length and time matches Alex's description. Look up "Let's Horribly Break Pokemon Blue", the "TAS" entries on the LP Archive page are documentation of the TAS.

[@RuyVuusen]

​@@alexlamoureux1049KZbin very much seems to dislike foreign links. Every time I have tried to post them, my comments have been shadowbanned.

[@Abyssoft]

I'm already subbed, but you can item underflow my brain anyway.

[@MarkBonneaux]

I normally watch a few vids before I sub to someone but if someone I have alerts for is subbed? Dude, done.

[@0zNIE]

Viewer tested, abyssoft approved. You both have awesome and informative videos

[@damiencouturee6240]

​@@MarkBonneauxOh you won't be disappointed with Swellman, not at all.

[@Kale-from-the-Future]

😂😭

[@zeebaka]

how long until someone just decides to run DOOM in pokemon RBY through glitching

[@Psycheux_]

as SOON as COOLTRAINER was brought up i got hit with a nostalgia wave of watching old MissingNoXpert's "Let's Glitch Pokemon Yellow" videos back in the day

[@5eur]

Good times miss em so much

[@Psycheux_]

@@5eur agreeed i believe they unlisted the old vids but i think they are still accessible! always fun to go back to when the nostalgia hits hard. ^w^

[@Niles-ei1ww]

same here

[@letcreate123]

9:53 CrossCode music jumpscare Good vid

[@DoctorSwellman]

Love me some CrossCode

[@zair645]

6:14 legend of the dragoon music jumpscare also a CrossCode enjoyer lots of good music in this vid

[@koromarugbd5252]

Back to the Future! The game

[@sealcuddl3r]

Oh man, I also believed in Down+B helping the catch rate for way too long back in the day >.

[@darkmetal2412]

I love how easy it is to break old Pokemon games. Like it's just borderline hacking but its all internal

[@concerninghobbits5536]

I subscribed fully of my own free will and not because DoctorSwellman was outside my house with his goons intimidating me... and also I love how this explains everything in so much detail but straightforward enough that it all either makes sense or if something is too complicated it doesn't feel like I need to understand it to get the rest of the vid. Like a few of the glitches were a bit over my head but I felt like I knew what was going on, some vids get so confusing so fast if you don't know computer science

[@TheDeadmanTT]

I have no idea about programming or how code works in general, so this is basically like seeing the matrix code in the hit documentary "The Matrix (1999)"

[@TheDeadmanTT]

Did the matrix predict pokemon speedrunning?

[@mordet2]

Bro, what the hell! Your VG OST choices were so good I just vibed to it the whole time. Imma gonna have to watch the video again...

[@yokoelfvganime8112]

Exactly!

[@yuenakagawa]

Immediately had to follow for the use of PMD and Oneshot OST tracks, lovely video!

[@dennispendry6601]

Nice video. Super detailed as always

[@joedlvr]

aw he’ll yeah me and my girlfriend (body pillow) can’t wait 2 watch this😊

[@BashPrime]

You didnt use redbar for the whole video but part of it did and that's okay

[@ChronoSquare]

With how well understood the OG Pokémon games are by this point has anyone attempted to contact the games' original creators to see what their reaction is to their long effort being vulnerable to breaking open to this degree? Dang man I miss the 90s

[@denis2381]

They don't care

[@belstar1128]

a lot of the time the creators forgot most of the details of making the games like they ask them basic questions about character design. but half the time they don't even remember what year the game came out or what platform it was for quite strange .

[@mikemath9508]

gamefreak has had 30 years to upload a patch for this darn game.

[@edgarmarcano4421]

i love your content. I don't speedrun, don't watch speedrunners, and overall don't live in that world at all, but this is so informative and entertaining, thank you

[@LeechyBoi]

your editing is phenomenal but some of these color choices are really tough to look at 😔

[@jetcaspian2882]

Love the music choices man 😊

[@aspiringgirl4422]

I didn't understand a single word of that. I'll come back to this video after college or something.

[@Miridia]

Oh hell yeah CrossCode and battle network music

[@ShuriBear]

Underflow my brain doccie

[@iBenjamin1000]

the gen 5 red bar music is crazy

[@TraxtasyMedia]

hands up who unintenially did the Missigno Masterball duplication glitch? This is the same glitch on a whole different level, but it's where it all started, always remember that, when watching a Pokemon first gen speedrun :D Awesome video DoctorSwellman.

[@maxb2000]

how were you able to unintentionally do the missingno glitch? rewatching the catch tutorial at the point in the game where you have fly and access to Cinnabar Island is out of place enough, immediately flying to Cinnabar Island after watching it (walking to another screen would also break the glitch) and surfing along the coast (without going into the water where it'd fix the encounters) is further out of place

[@TraxtasyMedia]

@@maxb2000 unintentionally in case of RAM manipulation. I wasn't aware as a kid, that we were messing with the game data to perform that glitch.

[@denis2381]

I am always doing nonsense in games. Especially as kid i did.​@@maxb2000

[@Double-Negative]

brilliant diamond & shining pearl has its own reverse badge order route. It was first developed by Shrtct and since we can't get arbitrary memory access with the bag, we actually have to go to each gym in reverse order. I run glitched all key items which is a much more in-depth category

[@Peelster1]

I did a run like this without warps. Set up was Brock Through Walls glitch. Got 8F to set up Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE) and items for walk through walls code. Then attempted to use it as little as possible. 1. Walked Through the Gym Door in Viridian. 2. Walk Through Walls to Cinnabar, did the Mansion normally. 3. Can either Walk Through Walls to Fuschia to Safferon or go forward and do Brock Skip and Walk Through Walls in Cerulean to Safferon. (Could go to Bill's House to leave town as well to move the police. Walk Through Walls around the Rocket Grunt blocking the Safferon Gym door. I had already given a Fresh Water to the guards when acquiring 8F. 4. Go get Poke Flute normally, Poke Doll glitch if you want. I was also doing a Reverse Rival Order so I just did Walk Through Walls around Snorlax. You could also Trainer Fly remove Snorlax glitch. 5. Safari Zone and Koga normally. 6. Back up the way you came to Celadon. Walk Through Walls around the Cut trees. 7. Walk to Vermilion. Surf to the gym. 8. Up Underground Pass to Cerulean. 9. Diglett's Cave or Fly to Pewter. (I was also playing without Fly.)

[@kepler69c32]

this should have its own category. like RBA warpless

[@Peelster1]

@@kepler69c32 The way I did it was slower than it could have been. You could still acquire bag underflow faster and probably give yourself a permanent walk through walls instead of using 8F to do it. Probably could give yourself badges or at least badge flags for HM use as well. If you can give an HM flag without the badge, that would probably be allowed, but if that flag also always gives you the badge, it shouldn't be as the point is to still fight the gym leaders.

[@kepler69c32]

@@Peelster1 yeah I see. I think some people did a run without bag overflow glitch back then (only for pokémon Yellow). if you search for entrpntr you will find it. there is a very weird manip to do before viridian forest which blows my mind

[@golderzoa]

i've done runs of this category once the mewtwo route was a thing but the run became way too complex so i ended up retiring the run. that tas was so bad i had no idea what i was doing i brute forced that entire tas i gotta rewatch it. i had 0 idea what i was doing back then. i remember making that tas in like a couple hours or something.

[@gaminggoddess85]

Well I didn't expect to see a Revolutionary Girl Utena profile picture today, and especially not in a video about Pokemon glitches.

[@BryceDixonDev]

A couple corrections: The Gameboy CPU has no built-in RNG functionality meaning each game needs to implement its own method of calculating random numbers, which is usually advanced every frame (eg: Tetris for NES), every RNG request/call (eg: Paper Mario TTYD), or when either occurs (I don't know any examples off the top of my head; it'd be to prevent RNG manipulation while also allowing multiple RNG values to be generated per frame). At 4:36, you mention that RNG advances every CPU cycle, which is incorrect. IIRC Pokemon Gen 1 refreshes RNG once per frame, which would be ~59.7275 times per second and while I'm not familiar with its specific RNG implementation, typical implementations at the time take between 30-100 CPU cycles, depending on the hardware and implementation. Buffer overflows (11:00) aren't *just* caused by memory copies, though that will typically result in the most obvious symptoms in older software, but any time a given buffer is accessed with an index larger than or equal to its size. If you have a list of 10 numbers and accidentally try to access the 12th, that's *still* a buffer overflow, but likely won't result in anything too destructive (see how NES Tetris handles the level numbers above 29).

[@Kirbomb21]

Anything done with ACE just seems like the most insane stuff to me. Like did the developers even know their own games could be essentially recoded in-game in real time through exploits? it always cracks me up because it just seems like it could easily all be an edited video but there really is just really insanely talented people who both figure out how to break the game and then even apply it to an RTA run. Thanks for the video.

[@SaikyoKoutei]

They would be embarrassed of how little (or inexistent) read or ram protection these pokemon games had lol but that make the RBG games unique that even in a casual playthrough you can skip some parts or use some glitches that don't need frame perfect inputs.

[@Manticorpse]

Red and Blue weren't so much as programmed as they just mutated themselves into cartridges made from leftover spaghetti code

[@bijan8713]

Dude you're my favorite youtuber by far. I've been watching your videos for quite awhile now, and some of your earthbound stuff before. Thanks for making cool content and I hope you keep doing so for a long time!

[@draculactica]

I especially love your vids about pokemon speedruns. At least one part of every run is just sublimely weird lol Sincerely, uuAAA

[@DanteSoulest]

I'm baffled by how people figure out all these crazy shenanigans for speedrunning. From this to Zelda Ganonfloor, like HOW. Also, the choice in Legend of Dragoon music automatically makes the video a 10/10 before any other content for me. 😂 ❤

[@rei.]

normalize LOTAD (Low-Optimization Tool-Assisted Demonstration) instead of LOTAS (Low-Optimization Tool-Assisted Speedrun)

[@felicityc]

gamblers will independently come up with down-b myths forever and for eternity. no matter how much it's disproven objectively

[@foodstuff]

Ugh… why am I drooling on my desk…? …when did I subscribe to DoctorSwellman…?

[@OryxTheMadGod3]

it doesn't feel right to watch a pokemon glitch explanation video without the gamecorner music in the background

[@Kyoslilmonster]

SWELLY dropping ANOTHER ABSOLUTE BANGER

[@CabinetGremlin]

based oneshot ost

[@thepancakecat6679]

based oneshot ost

[@ZoofyZoof]

Reminds me of when I used glitches to play Fnaf: SB backwards

[@BGDMusic]

3:39 i got so jumpscared by this song AAAA i love it so much aosiwj

[@LilacMonarch]

reverse bottle adventure is my favorite pokemon speedrun

[@DarkenedAuras7653]

I hope you know you cant sneak that Oneshot music past us

[@Masahane]

I like how the gym leader battles are the least interesting and covered parts of this run. Amazing.

[@Ninshi2g]

I love how much LoD music you use in your videos

[@luqdude]

I love your music choice, CrossCode is one of my favorite games and has such good music

[@Dracogame]

This will not work on EU versions btw.

[@lindseybrown5648]

WOOT!!! Been waiting on a vid like this!

[@Hijelk]

legend of dragoons backround music...wp mate

[@godly74]

This video was really well edited!!

[@tylerwebb2495]

MMBN music popping off

[@vilxdryad8479]

The The Legend of Dragoon music made me smile :)

[@devonodevon]

Editing is top notch.

[@levimogford3202]

holy shit im hearing legend of dragoon ost