When I activated the 0x1636 glitch using a GameShark, my Game Boy Advance screen flickered. The usual battle music warped into a low, humming drone. And there it stood on the virtual grass of Route 1: a Squirrel. Not a Pikachu. Not a Sandshrew. A pixelated, orange-furred squirrel with a single stripe down its back and eyes that glowed like embers. Its Pokédex entry, a garbled mess of Japanese characters and English phonemes, read: “This Pokémon fled the burning forests of 1636. It hides in the time-between-frames. It knows only the move ‘Ember Cache.’”
End of log.
So the next time you hear a rustle in the bushes outside, or see a squirrel bury a nut with frantic, purposeful energy, consider this: it might be hiding an Ember. It might be waiting for the right player to press A at frame 1636. And if you ever manage to catch it? Do not save. Do not trade it. Let it run back into the time-between-frames, where the autumn of 1636 never ends, and the forests of Kanto are still full of fire-colored squirrels. 1636 pokemon fire red squirrels
Most historians dismiss this as a sailor’s fever dream. But the code in FireRed tells a different story. When I activated the 0x1636 glitch using a