Why Pokemon Red Blue GameShark Cheats Are Still Kind Of A Mess (And Why We Loved Them)

You remember that chunky gray brick sticking out the back of your Game Boy? It felt illegal. Plugging a Pokemon Red Blue GameShark into your handheld was like hacking the Matrix before we really knew what hacking was. It didn't just give you items; it broke the reality of Kanto. Honestly, most of us just wanted a Mew or a bag full of Master Balls, but we ended up with glitched sprites, corrupted save files, and a weird sense of power.

Back in the late 90s, the GameShark was the ultimate playground equalizer. If you didn't live near a Toys "R" Us for an official distribution event, you were basically locked out of the Pokedex's 151st slot. The GameShark changed that. But it wasn't just a "press button, get Mew" situation. It was a chaotic, hexadecimal nightmare that sometimes worked and sometimes turned your Hall of Fame into a graveyard of scrambled pixels.

How the Pokemon Red Blue GameShark Actually Manipulated Your Game

Most people think the GameShark just "gave" you things. It’s actually more technical than that. Basically, the device uses "RAM hacking." It intercepts the communication between the Game Boy’s CPU and the game cartridge. Instead of the game reading what's actually in your inventory, the GameShark forces a specific value into a specific memory address.

For instance, the address 0163D9D0 is the legendary code for Infinite Rare Candies.

The first two digits (01) tell the Game Boy to write a value. The next two (63) represent the quantity—in this case, 99 in decimal. The remaining digits are the memory address for the first slot of your items. It’s brute-force logic. The game doesn't "know" you have 99 candies; it’s just being told by the GameShark hardware that the memory address for that slot must be 99, no matter what.

This is why things got glitchy.

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If you entered a code wrong, you weren't just failing to get an item. You were writing data into parts of the game’s memory that weren't meant to be touched. You could accidentally overwrite your player coordinates, your current map ID, or even the logic that governs how battles start. That’s how you ended up walking through walls or fighting a Level 155 Snorlax in the middle of Professor Oak’s lab.

The Mew Myth and the Infamous 0115D8CF Code

Everyone wanted Mew. It was the white whale of the 8nd generation. Rumors about trucks in Vermilion City were everywhere, but the Pokemon Red Blue GameShark was the only reliable way to actually see one. The code 0115D8CF became legendary. It swapped the encounter ID of the next wild Pokemon you saw with Mew.

But here’s the thing people forget:

If you caught a Mew using a GameShark, it often wouldn't obey you if you didn't have the right badges, or worse, it could flag your save as "unclean" if you tried to trade it to a friend who was a purist. There was also a massive risk of "Bad EGG" scenarios in later generations, but in Red and Blue, the primary risk was just straight-up crashing the game.

I remember a kid in my middle school who tried to force a Mew encounter while standing in the tall grass near Pallet Town. He forgot to turn the code off after the battle started. The game kept trying to "inject" Mew into the battle data even after the fight was over. His screen turned into a soup of black bars and high-pitched screeching. He lost a 60-hour save file. Gone. Just like that.

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Why Codes Sometimes Failed

1. Regional Differences: Codes for the North American (NTSC) versions often wouldn't work on the European (PAL) versions because the memory addresses shifted slightly during localization.
2. Revision 1.1 vs 1.0: Nintendo actually released a second version of Red and Blue that fixed some minor bugs. If your GameShark code was written for v1.0, it might target the wrong RAM address on a v1.1 cart.
3. Hardware Fatigue: Those GameShark units were notoriously flimsy. Sometimes the code didn't work simply because the pins were dirty or the unit wasn't seated perfectly in the slot.

Walking Through Walls: The Ultimate Game Breaker

The "Walk Through Walls" code (010138CD) is probably the most famous piece of Pokemon Red Blue GameShark lore. It disabled the collision detection entirely. You could walk over the ocean, through trees, and behind the gym statues.

It was a window into how Game Freak actually built the world. You could see that the "Mysterious Truck" near the S.S. Anne was just a static asset sitting on a tiny island of tiles that were never meant to be stepped on. You could bypass the guards at the Saffron City gates without giving them a drink.

But it was dangerous. If you walked too far off the map, you’d enter "Glitch City." This was an area where the game attempted to load map data from memory addresses that contained junk data. The result was a psychedelic landscape of house tiles, water, and NPCs that didn't exist. If you saved your game inside Glitch City, you were effectively stuck forever.

The Ethics of the Cheat: Did it Ruin the Game?

Looking back, did the Pokemon Red Blue GameShark ruin the experience? Honestly, it depends on who you ask. For the competitive kids, it was a way to bypass the grueling grind of leveling up to 100. Why spend weeks fighting Elite Four members when a Rare Candy code could do it in five minutes?

However, there was a psychological cost. Once you could have any Pokemon at any level, the "magic" of the journey started to fade. The struggle against Whitney’s Miltank (wait, that was Gen 2, but you get the point) or Blue’s Charizard meant something because of the effort involved. When you have a team of six Mewtwos at Level 100 before you even get to Brock, the game becomes a boring walking simulator pretty fast.

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Beyond Mew: Weird Codes You Probably Forgot

While Mew and Rare Candies were the big hitters, there were some truly bizarre things you could do with a GameShark if you knew the right hex values.

• Modify Trainer Name: You could change your name mid-game, though it often glitched the dialogue boxes.
• Encounter MissingNo: While MissingNo is a natural glitch, you could use a GameShark to force it to appear without doing the Cinnabar Island shore trick.
• Infinite Money: The code 019946D3 (and its partners) basically gave you a bottomless wallet, making the 1,000,000 PokeDollar Bicycle actually obtainable without the voucher.
• Catch Trainer Pokemon: There was a code that fooled the game into thinking a Trainer's Pokemon was actually a wild one. You could literally steal Blue’s starter.

How to Safely Use GameShark Logic Today

If you're playing on original hardware, be careful. These devices are decades old. The internal battery in your Red or Blue cartridge is likely dying anyway, and the added stress of RAM injection doesn't help.

If you are using an emulator, "GameShark codes" are still the standard format for cheats. Most emulators like RetroArch or mGBA have a dedicated menu for these. The difference is that emulators are much more stable. If a code crashes the game, you can just uncheck the box and reload a save state. You don't have to worry about the "Blue Screen of Death" on your physical Game Boy.

Actionable Steps for Modern Retrogaming:

1. Backup Your Save: Before using any memory-altering code, use a device like a GB Operator to dump your save file to a PC.
2. One Code at a Time: Never stack codes. If you run "Infinite HP" and "Walk Through Walls" simultaneously, the RAM addresses might conflict, leading to an immediate crash.
3. The "Toggle" Rule: Only turn the GameShark on when you need it. If you're using a code to encounter a specific Pokemon, turn the code OFF as soon as the battle begins. This prevents the code from overwriting the data for the actual capture or the post-battle experience points.
4. Check Your Version: Verify if your ROM or cartridge is the v1.0 or v1.1 release. A quick search of the code on sites like "The Cutting Room Floor" can tell you which version the hex addresses are mapped for.

The legacy of the Pokemon Red Blue GameShark isn't just about cheating. It was about exploration. It was about the community of players figuring out how to peek behind the curtain of a game that defined a generation. We weren't just playing Pokemon; we were deconstructing it. Just make sure you don't save in Glitch City.