I want to be clear that I've played Pokemon FireRed enough times to know when something is wrong. I know the game. I know its edges. What was on this cartridge was not FireRed.
It looked like FireRed. The title screen was correct, the music was correct, the save file selection screen was correct except for one thing: there was already a save file, and the name on it was RED, written in all capitals, in a font rendering that was slightly too large for the text box — the characters almost touched the edges, which I've never seen in any legitimate save file in any Generation 3 Pokemon game.
I loaded it out of curiosity.
RED was standing on Route 1 — the first route, north of Pallet Town, the one you cross in the opening minutes of the game. He had six Pokemon. All six were at level 255, which is not a level that exists in Generation 3. The display for level 255 wrapped the counter and displayed a character that wasn't a number. The party screen showed them all in perfect health.
His Pokedex showed 386 seen and 386 caught. Every Pokemon. Every one. But there was an additional counter I had never seen before — below the caught/seen numbers, a third line that read: [THEM: ???]. No label I could identify, the number a string of question marks.
His trainer card showed eight badges. But the eighth badge wasn't any badge I recognized — not a Kanto badge, not a Johto badge. It was an image the game rendered as a silhouette, a shape that kept resolving differently each time I looked at it: oval, then angular, then something with too many points. The location listed for the eighth badge read: PLACE 9.
There is no Place 9 in FireRed. There is no location in any Pokemon game I have ever played called Place 9.
I tried to move RED. He moved normally. I took him to Pallet Town, thinking I'd try to trigger something, some dialogue. Oak's lab was there. I went in. Professor Oak was standing at his desk, facing away, which is not his default position in FireRed — he always faces the door. I approached him. He turned around.
His sprite was wrong. Not corrupted wrong — intentionally wrong. The colors were inverted, and his expression, which in the original game is welcoming, was something I couldn't parse exactly. Not threatening. More like someone who is very tired and not entirely surprised to see you.
His dialogue box opened. It read:
"He has been waiting at the end of Route 1 for a very long time."
Then the screen faded to black. When it came back, RED was standing on Route 1 again, in the same place I'd found him. The save file was intact. Nothing had changed.
I put down the Game Boy SP and didn't pick it up again for a few days.
When I did, the save file was still there. RED was still on Route 1. His eighth badge still read PLACE 9. The third Pokedex counter still read [THEM: ???].
I've done some research into what PLACE 9 might mean. I've found references in older Pokemon fan communities to a theory that the games' maps, in the original Generation 1, contain unused space — not just off-screen areas but genuinely empty map slots that were allocated in the code but never filled. Slot 9 in the original FireRed location table is one of these empty slots.
The theory says that some Pokemon — the real ones, the original ones, the ones that were designed first and then changed or removed before the game shipped — they come from the empty slots. They live in PLACE 9 and the other unnamed locations. They exist in the game's geography even though the game was never finished for them.
RED's badge is from one of those places.
He's been waiting at the end of Route 1 for a very long time.
Waiting for a trainer good enough to take him where he's trying to go.