{"id":36378,"date":"2026-03-21T20:16:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-21T20:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/36378\/"},"modified":"2026-03-21T20:16:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-21T20:16:08","slug":"speedrunner-discovers-massive-glitch-in-pokemon-switch-port","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/36378\/","title":{"rendered":"Speedrunner Discovers Massive Glitch In Pok\u00e9mon Switch Port"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pok\u00e9mon is popular among most companies, but the long-running series has an especially strong hold on the speedrunning community. The earliest games are built on fragile coding, with certain glitches<\/a> becoming apparent to even the most casual schoolyard players. Any exploit is a rare candy to speedrunners, which is why a new time skip, discovered in the recent Pok\u00e9mon FireRed Switch port, has put some records back on the table.<\/p>\n

Released as part of the 30th anniversary celebration, the new version of Pok\u00e9mon FireRed has invited speedrunners to reopen the hunt for potential new exploits. The best of the bunch was found completely by accident. Swiss runner iamClemi<\/a> was in Professor Oak\u2019s lab, hoping to pick up a Charmander with good stats. The runner accidentally pressed the L button, larger on a Switch than on the native Game Boy Advance, bringing up the help menu. iamClemi noticed something was off. A sound cue that usually plays when picking up the Pok\u00e9 Ball was absent. It didn\u2019t save seconds then and there, but as all good runners know<\/a>, where there\u2019s smoke, there\u2019s FireRed.<\/p>\n

Bringing up the help menu did, in fact, cancel out many sound prompts through the game. In some instances, like picking up items or healing at Pok\u00e9mon Centers, the player character still stood still in silence, as if honoring the missing jingles. However, when catching a wild Pok\u00e9mon, the usual pause for fanfare skips entirely, fast-forwarding the player to the Pok\u00e9Dex entry.<\/p>\n

\u201c[This is] by far the largest time save discovered in any Game Boy Pok\u00e9mon game since RNG manipulation was found nearly a decade ago,\u201d said runner Gunnermaniac in a YouTube video<\/a>. \u201cThis is huge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gunnermaniac is the current record holder for clearing the Elite 4 Round 2 category<\/a>, a prologue added to the FireRed and LeafGreen versions of the game. Completing this challenge requires certain conditions to be met, such as capturing at least 60 unique Pok\u00e9mon. The new skip saves 2.68 seconds for every captured Pok\u00e9mon, which doesn\u2019t sound like much, but those seconds add up quickly for a number of speedrunning categories. Gunnermaniac acknowledges this discovery puts his own record in danger, which is always exciting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pok\u00e9mon is popular among most companies, but the long-running series has an especially strong hold on the speedrunning…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36379,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[21425,21426,41,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-36378","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-switzerland","8":"tag-pokemon-firered-and-leafgreen","9":"tag-speedrunning","10":"tag-swiss","11":"tag-switzerland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116269009017966009","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}