Why did Missingno destroy my Yellow save file?

Question

I was playing Pokemon Yellow on the virtual console and was going to do the Missingno glitch. When I encountered Missingno, my game crashed, but when I opened it again, it said my save file was destroyed and I had to start a new game. I looked it up and people have said that Missingno doesn't corrupt your save file. Why did this happen?

Comments

can you give us more detail please?

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There aren't really any other details. That was all.

Answer 1

I'm going to assume you used the Mew glitch to find the Pikachu-colored, vaguely square-shaped version that's usually found in Yellow, and not the d-shaped purple version that's usually found in Red and Blue.

This form's sprite pointer (0x0600) is invalid so it has a high risk of upsetting the game and making it freeze [source], unlike the other form. That isn't to say that weird things can't happen with the other form, but if you want to play around with MissingNo., you're probably better off doing it in Red/Blue.

It is unusual that you lost your save file, since that's usually more associated with turning off the system while saving, but it seems unlikely that you can do anything to recover it if it told you that it was "destroyed." It is difficult to determine why this happened without more information since all we can really do is assume that performing glitches was the cause, even if that doesn't usually happen.

Comments

Thanks, that's really useful. But I still kind of wish that someone had told me that before I tried to do this and lost my save file :/

Edit: btw when I encountered missingno, it performed the cry and the screen went white, so I assumed that the game crashed and I exited the game.