1998 was one heck of a year for video games. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Resident Evil 2, Metal Gear Solid, Banjo-Kazooie… all absolute classics, and frequent contenders in🅺 Best Game Ever Made™ lists all around the world.

This was also the year that the likes of Spyro the Dragon, F-Zero X and cult classic MediEvil were released. What was in the water at development studios around the world in 1998? It's impo⭕ssible to say, but some of them could sure use🐼 a dose of it today.

You probably see where we're going with this. Amongst all of that, 1998 also saw another🐻 title make its western debut✨. A game that, by all conventional logic, was inherently Japanese and shouldn’t really have gotten far elsewhere.

That game was Pokémon Red and Blue, probably the biggest success story in handheld gaming history (Tetris aside). It was an incredibly am🌠bitious title for the humble🌳 Game Boy, and a heck of an achievement for Game Freak.

Younger Pokémon fans might look at this old relic and scoff, two decades later, but the oldies among us remember the sheer joy of getting our first starter Pokémon (Charmander for life), ✱battling Brock for the first time, finally besting the Elite 4… ah, the memories that are thundering through our nostalgia-glands right now.

If it’s been about fifteen years since you last played this one, or you’re one of those new Pokémon fans experiencing its monochrome majesty for the fౠirst time, here are some of 📖the best secret areas (and secrets hidden in familiar areas) that will probably pass you by.

Meౠw’s infamous truck? The developers putting themselves in the game? A mysterious b💞attle with Professor Oak himself? Buckle up, friends, it’s all here.

25 Glitch City Will Make A Mess Of Whichever Area You Visited Last

Now, with Red and Blue being the very first games in the series, it’s only fair to expect💙 🤡a few… anomalies. Over the years, players have discovered that certain areas of Kanto are a good deal less stable than others, and this has left them ripe for glitch-exploiting.

One such area is the Safari Zone. As players will know, this is a sort of minigame area that the player is𒆙 allowed to roam and catch Pokémon in until they’ve taken 500 steps. , there’s a way to glitch out the Safari Zone, so that you can leave and have the step counter keep ticking away.

What happens when 🌊your steps reach zero outside of the Safari Zone? Well, a horrible mess known as Glitch City, that’s what. A broken, distorted version of whichever area you were in at the time.

24 Cinnabar Island Is Home To MissingNo.

All you need to do is watch the o🥃ld man in Viridian City demonstrate his how-to-catch-a-Pokémon party trick, then Fly over to Cinnabar and surf along the eastern coast of the island (make sure you’re touching the coast of the island itself, don’t stray into the ocean).

Follow these steps correctly (and maybe fight a regular battle or two first) until the broken glitch-mon MissingNo. emerges as a wild encounter. Defeat it (it can play havoc𒁃 on your save file if you catch it, so probably don’t do that), and you’ll find that the sixth item in your bag has been duplicated 128 times. Limitless Rare Candies, here we go.

23 Glitching The Safari Zone Onto Cinnabar Island

Way back in the day, the Safari Zone was many players' favorite location in Red and Blue. It was one heck of a pain to catch the rarer ‘mon (Kangaskhan in particular just point-blank did not want to come home with us, however many rocks we threw), but it was a neat idea and ෴a great twist on♎ the Pokémon catching mechanics.

It was also, as we say, very volatile from a gameplay standpoint. You wouldn’t know it from playing through the game as ‘intended,’ but it’s surprisingly easy to glitch the system. you can surf along the coast to encou🎶nter Pokémon from the last route you were in.

This includes the Safari Zone, meaning that you can take on Kangaskhan, Scyther, and such without time🌠 limitations. Or throwing💙 rocks.

22 You Can Use The Cut TM To Remove Patches Of The Long Grass

Ah, yes. When it comes to the Pokémon franchise, is there any location more iconic than simply, ‘The Long Grass?’🤡 No, friends, n𒊎o there isn’t.

As we all know, this is where the wild Pokémon live, the area where you’ll find a great majority of your random encounters (those darn constant Zubat and other cave encounters notwithstanding). Knowing this, there’s a clever little trick you can expl﷽oit.

That Cut TM? That isn’t just for trees, you know. You can a🎉lso use it to slice away 2x2 patches of long grass, making for an elaborate but brilliant way to pass through mandatory gra♕ssy areas when you really, really don’t want to battle.

21 Route One: The Secret 'Bird-Type' Pokémon

Now, we can’t voice our appreciation fo🌸r that sweet, sweet long grass without discussing the very first patch in the game. Route One is an area that will be intimately familiar to a whole generation of you (that music’s probably playing in your head at the very mention of it), and it also holds an interesting secret.

One of the very first P🐎okémon you encounter on your adventure will be a Pidgey, the original Route One Trash-tastic Flying-Type™. Did you know, though, that Pidgey came close to not being a Flying-type at all?

As we reported over on TheGamer, Game Freak originally intended to create the Bird-type. Fortunately, early in the process, the team decided against this, presumably realizing that 'Flying' is 🍰a far better catch-all for winged things that are not birds.

Does Yveltal loo🐠k like a sparrow to you? It does not.

20 Game Freak Coded Themselves Into The Game, In Celadon City

The different regions of the Pokémon games, as we know, tend to be references to particular regions of real-world Japan. As such, it’s no surprise that Game Freak decided to throw in a reference to a real-world Japanes♑e development team too. Namely themselves.

This trend was established right from the very first game. Here, the team’s headquarters is in Celadon City’s Celadon Condominiums. At its heart, it’s just a cool little ♉touch that casual players are likely to pass right by, but the building is certainly worth a visit. For one thing, there’s an Eevee here that the player can collect.

The main allure for the Pokémon faithful, however, is the fact that you can meet the game’s developer here as an NPC, and if you complete your Pokédex𒆙, he’ll reward you with a diploma.

19 Viridian City's Gym Was Originally Going To House A Battle With A Young Giovanni

In a lot of ways, Viridian City serves as an extended tutorial for the game. Many young📖er players are still very much finding their feet and exploring at this point, after all, and it’s super important to breဣak them in gently.

The Bug Catchers in Viridian Forest are a great way of doing so, teaching us how battles play out while pitt💖ing us against… well, Metapods and other feeble foes. Did you know, though, that there was originally going to be a gym leader battle in the city?

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:According to some old artwork that Ken Sugimori revealed for the first time recently, the first gym leade♎r was⛎ originally going to be what looks like a much younger Giovanni.

18 Lavender Town's Theme Was Rumoured To Make Players Ill

Yep, Lavender Town is yet another area that you’ll have to visit on your journey through the main story. As befits its spooky atmosphere, though, it’s home to all kinds of s⛎ecrets🔜 and mysteries that inexperienced players will have probably never heard of.

It’s just a Creepypasta magnet. Take the suppos🎃ed Lavender Town Syndrome, for instance. The story goes that, soon after the game’s original release in Japan (February 1996), children were being affected by the music of Lavender Town. It was said to be of🦂 a very high frequency that only young children could hear, and was making them become ill and giving them headaches.

It’s all just a stor♒y, but on💮e so popular that it’s become part of Lavender Town’s frightening vibe.

17 The Pokémon Mansion Houses A Frightening Secret In The Japanese Version

Crossing back over to Cinnabar Island now, we’re going to take a look at the Pokémon Mansion. The building was so named for the scientific research that too♚k place there, and the nature of this research has been made a little shonky by the English transla𒁃tion.

The documents you’ll come across in this derelict building explain that Mewtwo was created by a team of scientists. The original Japanese version of the game, however, states that just one scientist was responsible for Mewtwo’s birth. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:By the looks of it, it was Mr. Fuji.

You proꦑbably didn’t know this, and you almost certainly don’t know the rea🎀son for this discrepancy. Nobody does!

16 Cerulean Cave, The Hidden Home Of Mewtwo

It’s odd to think thꩲat there was ever a time when we didn’t have the almighty Google in our pockets at all times. When we had questions about useless trivia, we had to consult books or something. Remember when books existed? What a wild time to be alive.

We didn’t have GameFAQs or anything like that, either, which meant that game secrets could sometimes actually remain secret. For younger players, Cerulean Cave (the post-game home of Mewtwo) would be a darn o🍒bscure secret to find. You only get a glimpse of it in the background, after all, and it’s very early on. Would everyone think to come all the way back here later? Of course not.