After three long months, I have a NEW documentary premiering today - my first video since the Blastoise rescue! Here's a link: ua-cam.com/video/_BDClzHu-ho/v-deo.html
No wonder it got corrupted, he blows his cartridges shouldn't do that lol adds moisture to it and causes rust etc eventually you need to message him to stop this lol
Shut up, that was a waste of time. It's just code. Just buy a cartridge. He did this for content. You'll be one of those people that'll want to give robots human rights in the future
From a software engineer to another, Gary went absolutely NUTS. His level of knowledge on such an obscure topic and his reverse engineering process was brilliant AND he had every technical skill needed for the job. You can only reach that level when you’re truly passionate about something and he was above and beyond dedicated. Shouts out to my man
can we also talk about how lucky it is that gary, potentially the only person on the entire planet who could pull this kind of feat off within the available timeframe, was extremely personable and friendly, and willing to drop everything to invest his full effort into carrying the entire process? not to mention the program he just happened to have sitting around on his desktop from six years ago that ended up being instrumental. what an absolute legend
There’s tons of system engineers that could pull this off with time to learn how pokemon encodes everything, and the popular tools used. Difference is gary already knew those things.
@@nickspringer5755 and also that one program that he wrote back in 2015 that was instrumental to pull this off this quickly, i feel that without that piece of software this would have taken far longer to accomplish
@@carso1500 I mean, it goes back to what that guy was saying. A competent software engineer could easily design software like Gary's as well. It might've been instrumental to pull this off, but definitely not difficult to make.
The true icing on the cake here was that, in the end, Hydro Cannon on the Blastoise had 7 pp, not the base 5. So the game recognized this as the EXACT pokemon he had used the items on so many years ago. absolutely incredible
Yeah, I don't think he remembered the exact PP for each moveset, so the game actually took this data as the uncorrupted original blastoise. That's not cloning in my book, she was resurrected or "hatched" out of the bad egg.
As a student programmer, the concepts are one thing I understand, but to actually apply it to someone's life, even having others know that recovering data like this is incredible. Props to you, Gary, and the Gen III programmers who documented and learned GBA programming to let dreams continue. Cheers!
Same here- I wish we got a better look at what the actual code was as opposed to the cinematics/dramaticized version of it, but that’s probably just me/the other coders here lol
@@snowyches9886 Haha I was thinking the same thing! Like I know the cinematics are awesome and definitely pull in the majority of viewers, but *damn* I wanted to see more of what was going on at Gary's end...
from what I understood it was a simple ctrl+f but with extra steps to find the mention in the hall of fame and then to find the ev/iv they used the nature they found out in the hall of fame It had a saved profile on it it with the ev's/iv's they needed. Right?
Yeah, it's funny how from a technical standpoint this is pretty typical reverse engineering type work, but because it's so foreign to the author, it ends up being told as an epic tale. Cool that it meant something to the guy though, even if it's just a particular collection of bits
Honestly Gary's skills in his craft were nothing short of astounding. What an incredible individual and he seems like such a brilliant person! Fantastic video as always, I love to watch these journeys from start to finish!
I'd like to think I have a lot of knowledge when it comes to Pokémon games, but when I was watching this I realised that I don't. If I was in the place of Gary, I would have only managed to look in the code and find that the only place where Blastoise appeared was in the hall of fame, and wouldn't have been able to help Harrison. I respect Gary.
For real. I like to think he only took so long on some things to make a good video. He seems like a genius. You couldn’t have written a better build in tension. Also, 1000th like! Nice.
It’s me, Nintendo. I must say, everyone involved in the making of this video have demonstrated great resiliency and dedication for the preservation to our franchise. It is CLEAR our games have touched your hearts in a very deep and meaningful way. We will be sending you a cease and desist letter. Cut that shit out.
The fact that Gary was not only leagues beyond overqualified, but the one, lone, necessary thread to figuring this out is mind-melting. It could ONLY be Gary, and you found him.
@@thomasrothbacher5849 it would have entirely ruined the point/ they wanted the exact same blastoise because almost every pokemon has a different "personality" which is that iv stuff they were doing
To be fair, the tools for Gen 3 ROM hacking and save editing have been around for almost as long as the games themselves have. There are LOADS of tools for hyper-specific purposes from the days of forums reigning king, to make ROM hacking and save editing more accessible to the layman who doesn't know how to go straight into the memory to change values. Of course it's been around for years.
Gary is definitely a one in 7 billion kind of guy who was the best and probably only expert in his niche field and went well out of his way to help some guy he never met recover a long lost friend, he is the real pokemon champion.
It doesn't even feel like the Blastoise was cloned. It feels like the Blastoise had lost its physical form and only the soul of it remained. Through this process, they gave Blastoise its body back. Now the Blastoise can continue the adventure she shared with Harrison 15 years ago.
The best thing? Since it was the same blastoise as the one in the hall of fame, it must have the gen 3 ribbon for beating the champion. If you transfer it all the way to Sword and Shield, it'll have the title: "Blastoise the Champion"
@@Luchux177 Now this makes the already existing smile on my face even wider. This Blastoise truly is a champion. And I hope this story is remembered for years to come.
Gary is the kind of person who'd work for a software company, be the only guy who knows how the company's 60-year-old mission-critical hardware works, and be impossible for them to lay off because the company would collapse.
@@PhantomPr1me 7500 people were employed for a social media site 😭 they didnt need to be on pay roll to sit and do nothing every day. elon stated that they were workers he had watched do very little and they arent needed for a company to work.
Gary didn't have too help this random dude but after every obstacle he didn't give up and looks like he solved it in a decent amount of time. dude is a genius!
I fucking broke down crying when Gary said “I FOUND IT”. He’s a genuine sense of accomplishment from helping Harrison. He bashed his head against the wall all day to do something most would consider futile, frivolous. We need more peeps like Gary
I think this is my new favorite video on the internet. Pokemon was such an important part of my life growing up and seeing someone have a moment like that was absolutely heartwarming. Absolute 10/10, from start to finish.
Bro he took out the elite four low diff. In the Pokemon world the elite four is considered the government of their world which basically is a control of a nation.
The fact that it was Gary (Blue) who is clutch in saving the Blastoise is also so perfect. Gary went on to become a Pokemon researcher so to have Oaks Grandson come back to save a long lost Squirtle (Blastoise) is just so poetic.
Gary is a god damn genius. Seriously, its not even just his knowledge, or his programming skills, it's his ingenuity and problem solving that is just next level.
It's honestly not _that_ hard, from the programming side. I know about endianness and text encodings, and I could figure most of this stuff out. He was just flexing with his "bit masks", too; the "09" identifying it as Blastoise was already clearly visible in that value. Definitely kudos to the guy for researching into these savegames enough to know where and how to get all that data out, though. That's the _real_ skill.
My friend recommended me this video, that was an hour well spent. A guy who take a day off to another states to save his childhood Pokemon. A guy who would like to support and spectate how his friend rescue his childhood Pokemon. A guy who put in so much time to prepare and make this video possible and good. A guy who is so passionate in Pokemon and software, he can troubleshoot all the unsolvable problems in Gen3.
Ugh I got actual chills when those IVs were found. Crazy how generations were affected by these games, grew into the software geniuses, video gamers, and creative nerds we are out of pure love. Such a wild and beautiful journey, kudos to all involved.
Gary is the type of guy who makes you believe in humanity again. Imagine he had no gain in this but was totally invested with all his heart and passion. Thank you to everyone involved in this!
The almost 'paradoxical' thing about this though is that if he never corrupted this Blastoise to begin with he probably wouldn't have the same attachment to it. He's attached to it because of the memory of regret around it. Maybe he wouldn't even have cared about it or the game anymore... He might not even have kept the game or console if it weren't for his hope of fixing this mistake one day. Regret is a powerful emotion.
Bigger question that “would my Blastoise mean without the corruption?” is “would I be different without this formative event?” That, and would harambe still be “harambe” if not for the fatal shot? 🦍 👼
I kinda beg to differ. The Pokémon that carried me through my first game was very important to me as a 10yr old. Because I didn't corrupt him I was able to transfer him to future generations which means I've had him for over 14 years now and my attachment to him has only grown. He's been with me so long I'd be *devastated* to lose him. Still, regret *is* powerful and probably did change the way this Pokémon is important to him.
I'm 30 years old... watching this made me cry a little. The memories I had from that era aren't replicated today. When you didn't have friends to go hang out with, or anything to do; the pokemon games were there for you.
In December 1998 I was 14 and had a Blastoise and Dugtrio (my favorite pokemon too) who I loved so much. I remember they could beat the Elite 4 just the 2 of them. Level 100. We had an Accelerated Reader program at school that was for fun, where you read a book and take a 20 question test. You got extra credit if you scored well on it. One day during lunch, I took a test for a book I didn't read, Gulliver's Travels, and got a 5% (1/20) on it. I left the print out saying I failed in my backpack. My mom happened to go through my backpack one terrible, fateful morning, and thought I had actually failed a reading test. She got ultra mad, pulled me out of bed by my hair, and screamed at me for playing too much Pokemon as the reason why I failed a school assignment and didn't tell her. She took my Gameboy with the Pokemon Blue cartridge still in it, and smashed it with a hammer in front of me. I will never forget that morning.
dude… that is a heartbreaking story, BUT - the fact that you and i are both Dugtrio guys will bond us for eternity. thank you for sharing your tale, brother 🤝
@Mister MashupsYT I'd love to see/use that software! Since he mentioned this works for Gen II data structures, I have old Pokemon on a saved team on my Pokemon Stadium 2 game which are ghosts of the past. The saved file they were on no longer exists, but I use them on my saved teams for nostalgia.
I had a friend 20 years ago who used to spit in his game boy cartridge whenever it didn't work... and voila it worked! Lol I always found it disgusting, so I was like, nah don't spit in it again. Let me try. And I took it out and blew into the cartridge and the game boy slot as much as I could, tried it 10 times and it never worked. I concluded that you know, this time your game is probably broken He said, give it here. He spat in it and the first time he tries it, it works. I was like WTFFF. Why does nintendo want us to spit in it?
what a crazy journey. the lengths you went to salvage a complete stranger's FIFTEEN year old digital companion is just totally mindblowing, and makes for such a beautiful narrated video to watch. makes me wish i actually backed up & archived my old pokémon emerald saves from 2008 too aha...
wait.... yahi?!?!?!?!? this cant be real.... this.... cant.... you're not the right channel.... this ain't Yahiamice Live??!?!?!? could this be.... his main channel is active?!?!!??!!!? (this is a joke)
As a developer and an engineer myself, I am really amazed by Gary. I’m mostly a jack of all trades, master of none, so seeing someone being an absolute master of an extremely narrow field is very inspiring.
I know right? Everything from the bitmask thing, the little software he wrote years ago, for some reason it makes me so happy. It shows an overview of "the toolkit" of every computer scientist/engineer
Harrison was on the verge of tears the whole video. you can tell that even though this was a really unimportant task in the grand scheme of things, it really means a lot to him.
@@blueleader8323 I just meant as in, affecting most people, but I totally agree with you. All the money and power in the world doesn't matter if you aren't genuinely fulfilled.
All I gotta say is that I'd kill to be Gary's apprentice, just to learn these things. He stayed hopeful through this entire interaction and got the job done. I wanna be like that.... I want to learn to be like that.
@@MrHurricaneFloyd spoken like someone who is truly a prisoner to themselves, if you have any free will you have the option, if you can fathom the idea of changing you can change genuinely or ingeniously, it really doesn’t matter. As long as you have control you dictate your reactions.
There's a real beautifully human kindness in people coming together to help with such a small but complicated problem. Thanks for the video, incredible work.
I love how you can hear how exited Gary is every time he works something out, it's lovely when you get into that puzzle-solving mode where it doesn't really matter anymore what you're solving, as long as you just solve it.
My sad story of losing a beloved partner is with my Meowstic in X, my first pokemon game. His name was Tom I'm pretty sure...and i was going through my boxes one night frantically searching for him...and he wasn't there. I didn't remember trading OR releasing him, and now that I've actually discovered that I dissociate, (not diagnosed w anything but im looking into getting one) I very well couldve disossiated, traded or released him, and then switched back and had no idea it even happened, and like, i cried for hours over this
This is like diving into the river Styx, swimming all the way to the afterlife, finding a specific soul, and dragging it back to the world of the living.
Gary had me very suspect at first; before hearing his voice I thought Nick was Gary himself setting up a bait and Switch. Then hearing his voice I slowly built a trust and confidence in Gary. Gary's cinematic universe is the Matrix. The fact he didn't even promote his social media or anything from it is also very commendable for whatever reason he withheld it. Ironically while playing God, only God knows what Gary really did to get that Blastoise back.
i am a grown man, sitting here watching someone get his starter back while having tears in my eyes and i dont know why. this is such a great story - have fun with your old friend!
Really resonated with you guys, I’ve got my own story of losing my special Pokémon… The first two Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games are my favorite games of all time, the MOST influential in my life to this day… Blue Rescue Team was the first game I ever finished and my partner Pokémon I legit viewed as my best friend, the connection was so strong. My parents still tease me to this day about me running downstairs crying when I beat the game because “I had to leave my friend” :’) totally beautiful masterpiece haha Anyways, my brother REALLY wanted a turn playing and my mom FORCED me to let him have a turn on my game. I begrudgingly handed it over and he somehow ended up on the “delete save” screen that looked identical to the “continue save” screen. He was like “what do I do” so I just pressed what I thought was ‘continue’ and watched the save file get deleted before my very eyes. One of my most traumatic childhood memories ^^; anyways, loved the video + the happy ending!!
Same. Except I lost my copy of MD on vacation to Greece because there was a hole in my backpack on the way to the airport. So I really lost everything.
I clicked on this video thinking "this seems like a chill video to fall asleep too" I watched the whole thing. Invested by every twist and turn. Every roadblock you hit and overcome just to reunite two friends after 15 years and it couldn't have been more beautiful. I don't think it's cloned, you allowed it to escape the void of corruption that had trapped it all them years ago. Honestly Gary is a goat, no question asked. Overqualified doesn't cut it. Honestly I didn't expect to cry but I did. I love wholesome interactions like this and it's one of the many great things about the internet. I hope after all these years, Harrison takes blastoise on more memorable adventures.
I lost my childhood partner, Pidgeot when I used a GameShark. I got stuck in a house after saving because when I loaded the game a tree spawned in again. I didn't know about any kind of walk through walls stuff, as I was just eight and the internet wasn't something I even had back then. I stayed in that house for days trying to figure out something to do, but ultimately I just decided I would have to restart my game. I felt so sad because Pidgeot and the rest of my team were a big part of how I got through my parents divorce. It was a pleasant part of a very unpleasant part of my life. It still makes me sad to this day. Stuff really does stick with you extra hard emotionally speaking when you're a child.
Pidgeot was my main pokemon on my first playthrough on blue i had a thing about making non starters my main. But that must have sucked back then to happen to you
I got through my parents divorce with pokemon too. Typhlosion in heartgold, Blaziken in sapphire, Venusaur in leafgreen. They got 7 year old me through that bad time.
I started crying around 53:20. When I clicked this video, I wasn't expecting the documentary-style at all, or Harrison to come visit you in person to complete this project, or the discussion about whether a cloned Pokemon is identical to the origianal. To the person who helped datamine the games and provided his expertise during the resurrection process? you literally helped resolve Harrison's most longstanding personal regret. I was about to type that your dedication, for helping a complete stranger with such a, to most people, trivial problem, is amazing, but that feels grossly inadequate, and is selling your kindness short.
Emotional incontinence is not a virtue. You are either lying or have un unreal level of mental instability by watching a cloned digital asset be made through an editor designed to do just that. Jesus did not rise from the dead or perform miracles. Is this why the world needs safe spaces and the like? Please my friend, get some help.
Imagining this from Blastoise's perspective: you're going on a journey with your trainer, you've entered the hall of fame together, helped capture mewtwo and have scoured the entire region together. One day you start to feel strange, you suddenly feel a surge of strange energy, like you've eaten a rare candy but something is wrong. It's too much at once and everything goes black. For years you're stuck in stasis, possibly aware of the world around you as your trainer desperately tries to bring you back. And then one day, you wake up again to the sound of cheers and laughter
@@Criselyon Not quite, the reconstructed data directly overwrote the bad egg. It's more like the corpse of the corrupted blastoise was melted down and re-assembled into an identical one.
I never cried so hard… to see a long lost friend be brought back to life exactly how it was. It touched my heart and than some. I didn’t think something like this could be possible but to watch it happen is beyound breath taking. Congrats on getting your friend back brother !!!! Take good care of her and i want to know when you hit lvl 100 !!!
46:22 Since you wanted it, here you go. One IV has 31 different possibilities with only 1 of them being the correct one, essentially a 1/31 chance. There’s 6 IV’s, meaning that the probably would be 1/31^6 or 1/887,503,681. If you want that as a percentage: 0.000000113% So basically you would have been able to guess the exact amount of XP on the Blastoise before actually getting the IV’s correct. Gary saved a lot of trouble with his findings, because this may have become a many years endeavor of you just hitting randomize until it goes away.
I think you've been too pessimistic... 31^6 is "just" 887,503,681. I think brute forcing less than a billion values, with an ad hock piece of code, could be done in a day. Possibly even a few minutes, depending on the complexity of the checking algorithm, which I assume has not been deliberately hardened against a brute force attack.
If you take the time to do the division (on a calculator, of course.) it comes out to approximately 10 years assuming you clicked it once per second and were guaranteed to get it once you had clicked it 2,176,782,336 times. Also Matteo Falduto was correct in his correction and that number of 887,503,861 would take, under the same assumptions about 4 years.
This was so much more emotional than anticipated. Welcome home, Blastoise! I lost a LVL 100 Pikachu to a crushed PokeWalker when I was 10. I couldn't even touch Soul Silver after that, until a full year later when I was looking through the instruction booklet and found the code to retrieve a Pokemon from a PokeWalker. Felt like a pitt in my heart had been restored
I can relate to this so deeply because of the Safefile I lost by dropping my Gameboy color with Pokemon Red in it and my lvl ~60 Charizard with earthquake on it, I think i was 10 at that time.
I similarly thought my own Pokémon was lost forever when my Pokéwalker got crushed. When I figured it out and brought back my Weezing, I actually hugged my DS.
I watched the whole hour. This is one of those moments we may not all experience, but to see someone else achieve it makes us a better human. I am glad he was able to recover what was once lost
im crying. i feel like this kind of thing is such a relatable experience with every person. we all did something dumb in our childhood that we regret. if we could go back in undo it… we all would.
The amount of rare videos on UA-cam that take you on an emotional journey, emphasizes the fact of how rare they are. But this is definitely one of those videos
Ikr! Gary's knowledge just blew me away! I didn't even think this was possible. Just shows the sheer amount of work they have put into this project of bringing an old friends back to life! Big up everyone they did a phenomenal job!!
His voice is nice, too, he's the kind of person I could listen to talk about anything because he's just so enthusiastic, you can tell he really enjoys doing this sort of thing!
You guys were able to heal one of this man’s horrible childhood core memories and it’s great you can see the instant happiness in his face when he logged in that pc and seen it sitting there it was great
No cure can't heal his childhood wounds from being forced to load the game again and again in desperate agony covered in the dark black as the DEEPEST pit
As someone who is learning software dev and has recently been rekindling my kid nostalgia for Pokémon, the UA-cam algorithm really came together for this one.
This Gary... however you found him, he has a wealth of eclectic knowledge that just needs a little resources in the right places to make him an icon in the Pokemon world. Bless this mad lad.
Given how much he knows there is a fair chance he's already well-known under a different name. The only people who have a reason to know this much about pokémon data structures are romhackers (speaking as a former romhacker who had a moderate following on 4chan more than a decade ago myself). Nintendo's treatment of fan projects and the people who make them, and the occasional nasty element in that community, may also be why he wished to remain anonymous for this video, since he appears in it with things that might be able to connect him to his work enough to start picking at his identity and dox him, like the fact that he's swedish and even the formants in his voice.
I ve studied engineering and met people in the level of gary, at the very first instant he told you that "maybe" it was possible, I knew what was coming, people like him are really inspiring!
This right here is what makes you one of my favourite content creators. Didn't expect to be so invested in a near hour long video about something like this, but it's the authenticity, the passion and excellent storytelling that makes this channel so special. The twists and turns, the wholesome ending, this vid has it all.
Except for that one time he lied about not getting a cartridge on japanese ebay to drive suspense. Then later in the video fessed up, because the tension needed to go somewhere. So yes.... knows how to tell a story.
I will never forget being in second grade, riding in back seat of the car, discovering the meaning of the word "release"... I hope you lived a good life in the wild, Fearow; you are still missed.
“No way I’m watching this entire hour video” *watches entire video* I want to give Gary a hug, buy him a beer, give him money…everything. That guy was such a cool dude. If you ever see this, we may not know each other but I love you bro. That work you put in made my soul smile. Stay cool
This was such a very well pieced together video. So well pieced together that I might just rewatch it again tomorrow because Gary's knowledge on the file structure of Pokemon is INSANE.
"Strong Pokémon. Weak Pokémon. That is only the selfish perception of people. Truly skilled trainers should try to win with their favorites. I like your style. You understand what's important." You truly understand how important just one Pokemon can be to someone. It's incredible what you've done to help out someone who cared so deeply about a long lost friend.
This really is phenomenal. The fact that you came into contact with the exact person who could have fixed this problem is beyond words. 32 year old man sitting in my room crying happy tears thinking about my own childhood Blastoise. Saw someone else say it but this is may be my favorite video on the internet now.
If there is anything I care enough about, on the level of how much he cared for his pokemon, I hope I never lose it. This was a journey. I, too, am a 32 year old man. This is gold.
I'm kinda tearing up with the ending. Gary is a hero 👏. When I was a kid I used a GameShark and accidently turned my blastoise into a spearow ☠. Such i great video and story. Im a shiny hunter and I am going to shiny hunt a squirtle and name it Harriso💙
Why is this the best put together video I’ve ever watched in my life. The camera work and effects are incredible. Nice work. I will be watching in the future
It was so good watching him putting the cartridge in the GB. Whoever Gary is, he is a total beast, huge respect for spending his time helping them out!
gary went from cocky pokémon trainer to to gym leader to pokemon professor to bypassing the laws of his own games and saving a lost blastoise outside his fabric of reality
This dude Gary deserves some kind of prestigious award for his efforts. This entire thing was simply incredible. Easily one of the best videos I’ve watched on UA-cam.
in 2004, i was 4 years old and had my venusaur that i kept throughout my entire journey. In 2022, i still have the same venusaur. god i feel so good for this guy
Introduction / Issue - 00:00 Part 1 - Dumping the Cartridge - 11:32 Part 2 - Opening the Save in PKHEX - 13:56 Part 3 - Exploring His Memories - 20:19 Part 3.5 - Trying "A-SAVE" - 25:51 Part 4 - "A Jurassic Park Situation" - 34:41 Part 5 - Endgame - 41:47
"Your childhood cartridge?" "Yes." "Anything children touch becomes filthy. Clean it. Now." _Cleans the cart and it works again_ -The story of countless cartridge repairs
Understandable. Bought a few used GBC carts from Japan a few weeks ago. They glitch out when I plug it into my GBC for the first time. Pulled it out, contact cleaner on tissue paper, and the carts worked fine after a few passes of contact cleaner and tissue.
Had a local retro game shop advise me to clean a game I bought from them if it doesn’t work since they were lazy to do it themselves. Never saw a NES game be so filthy beforehand
@@RAMChYLD That's why I preemptively clean all used cartridges I buy, to avoid filthing up the port as that would be harder to clean. And also because I just don't like having dirty cartridges.
This is so Wholesome. We need a Netflix-style series of Pokemon being "saved" from corrupt files. Next episodes: this Blastoise jumping from LG all the way to modern consoles until Pokemon Shield.
For those who are curious the odds of them randomly selecting the correct ivs was about 1/32^6 or 1/1,073,741,824. So it was unlikely to say the least.
If you have to randomly guess them, correct. But actually, they are maybe less: a couple of Blastoise's IVs were 31 and that shouldn't be a case. At some point in the series starters and legendaries were generated with some maxed IVs. Btw, there are still too many combinations to try.
Literally a digital soul. No real discernable affect on character or appearance but that is what is used to determine whether or not it may be saved within the cloud. Now that an excellent(if unintentional) parallel.
This is legitimately a Netflix-worthy drama. I became fully emotionally invested in this to the point that I felt like that was MY Blastoise being rescued from all that corrupted code. All the setbacks and tense moments had me holding my breath, tapping my fingers, or doing that thing you do when you’re anxious where you blow air out of your mouth. Every little breakthrough that brought them a little closer to rescuing Harrison’s Blastoise had me doing a fist pump, going, “Yus,” cheering, or just getting super excited. All the crazy endeavors and tricks that were needed to bring her back just blew my mind. And the moment they manage to somehow finally dig her out of her corrupted prison, IVs intact and all, is incredible. The philosophical twists on this just adds to the cinematic vibes of this whole thing. After all, what is DNA but organic computer coding? What is computer coding but synthetic DNA? This was simply an incredible experience to watch! Oh and just FYI… all the cells and components of our bodies are replaced on a regular basis. Meaning we’re no longer made up of ANY of the same stuff physically we used to be. Old cells die and are replaced with new ones. Old hairs fall out and new ones grow in. But we’re still considered the same person and our DNA is still exactly the same. That is absolutely still the same Blastoise. I wonder… When Harrison transfers her into more modern Pokémon games, what flavor of food will she like? :P
Not sure why you'd insult this amazing video by calling it Netflix worthy. This is too good to be on Netflix next to the child porn and transphobic "comedy" specials.
Wasn't expecting to burst into tears multiple times over someone else's lost pokemon but this video really hit home for me. I lost 100+ hours of work on my Pokemon Blue game as a kid when my mom forced me to let some younger kids play with it and the little bastards saved over my game despite me telling them repeatedly that they can play as long as they don't save 😭😭😭
Yeah I accidentally left Pokémon red at my cousins house and my aunt mailed it back to me, and when I put the game in, it turned out she saved over it😭
I think the fact that this man found the Blastoise with some software that HE HIMSELF wrote over half a decade ago and hasn't released is probably the biggest flex of 2022.
After three long months, I have a NEW documentary premiering today - my first video since the Blastoise rescue! Here's a link: ua-cam.com/video/_BDClzHu-ho/v-deo.html
just waiting for it
Nice
pog ngonna be hyped
No wonder it got corrupted, he blows his cartridges shouldn't do that lol adds moisture to it and causes rust etc eventually you need to message him to stop this lol
Did you change your thumbnail twice?
This guy just bought a plane ticket and flew all the way to north carolina, just to save his lil' pokemon. this is love. this is true love.
@@zeekherevia997 and stop being annoying, why would I do that?
Facts
Shut up, that was a waste of time. It's just code. Just buy a cartridge. He did this for content. You'll be one of those people that'll want to give robots human rights in the future
@The Cluckster *code
I think true love would be to respect the memory of the dead rather than bring them back. But it's just code so it doesn't matter 😅
From a software engineer to another, Gary went absolutely NUTS. His level of knowledge on such an obscure topic and his reverse engineering process was brilliant AND he had every technical skill needed for the job. You can only reach that level when you’re truly passionate about something and he was above and beyond dedicated. Shouts out to my man
Gary is a certified awesome guy :)
@@itsathatguy9029 fr
True!
he's so cool...
def a master at reverse engineering
can we also talk about how lucky it is that gary, potentially the only person on the entire planet who could pull this kind of feat off within the available timeframe, was extremely personable and friendly, and willing to drop everything to invest his full effort into carrying the entire process? not to mention the program he just happened to have sitting around on his desktop from six years ago that ended up being instrumental. what an absolute legend
Definitely not the only person that knows how to do something like this lol
There’s tons of system engineers that could pull this off with time to learn how pokemon encodes everything, and the popular tools used. Difference is gary already knew those things.
@@nickspringer5755 and also that one program that he wrote back in 2015 that was instrumental to pull this off this quickly, i feel that without that piece of software this would have taken far longer to accomplish
@@carso1500 yep gary having that knowledge and programs already was super helpful
@@carso1500 I mean, it goes back to what that guy was saying. A competent software engineer could easily design software like Gary's as well. It might've been instrumental to pull this off, but definitely not difficult to make.
The true icing on the cake here was that, in the end, Hydro Cannon on the Blastoise had 7 pp, not the base 5. So the game recognized this as the EXACT pokemon he had used the items on so many years ago. absolutely incredible
Glad I'm not the only one who noticed!
That gave me the chills, but in a very good way.
That's quite literally insane in a good way. She was still there in the game even when she was trapped in that egg
ye
Yeah, I don't think he remembered the exact PP for each moveset, so the game actually took this data as the uncorrupted original blastoise. That's not cloning in my book, she was resurrected or "hatched" out of the bad egg.
As a student programmer, the concepts are one thing I understand, but to actually apply it to someone's life, even having others know that recovering data like this is incredible. Props to you, Gary, and the Gen III programmers who documented and learned GBA programming to let dreams continue. Cheers!
Same here- I wish we got a better look at what the actual code was as opposed to the cinematics/dramaticized version of it, but that’s probably just me/the other coders here lol
@@snowyches9886 Haha I was thinking the same thing! Like I know the cinematics are awesome and definitely pull in the majority of viewers, but *damn* I wanted to see more of what was going on at Gary's end...
well now I know without watching the video that he did it 😅
from what I understood it was a simple ctrl+f but with extra steps to find the mention in the hall of fame and then to find the ev/iv they used the nature they found out in the hall of fame It had a saved profile on it it with the ev's/iv's they needed. Right?
Yeah, it's funny how from a technical standpoint this is pretty typical reverse engineering type work, but because it's so foreign to the author, it ends up being told as an epic tale. Cool that it meant something to the guy though, even if it's just a particular collection of bits
The fact that harry is being helped by someone named gary whilst being spectated by his friend named bill is hilarious to me.
Reality is funnier than fiction
Dude...I'm so happy you got your Pokemon back.
@@harrykoeppel7684 I hope Blastoise someday makes it to the Nintendo Bank.
@@MadMan123654 I just tried downloading the pokemon bank, but it's shutdown loool
@@harrykoeppel7684That is indeed true.
Honestly Gary's skills in his craft were nothing short of astounding. What an incredible individual and he seems like such a brilliant person! Fantastic video as always, I love to watch these journeys from start to finish!
It seems like every retro game has a Gary equivalent. It's really neat to see people passionate about old games like that.
I thought I knew a lot about gen 3 cartridges and I'm astounded as well.
He sounds so young as well! Imagine being so knowledgeable at such a young age
I'd like to think I have a lot of knowledge when it comes to Pokémon games, but when I was watching this I realised that I don't. If I was in the place of Gary, I would have only managed to look in the code and find that the only place where Blastoise appeared was in the hall of fame, and wouldn't have been able to help Harrison. I respect Gary.
For real. I like to think he only took so long on some things to make a good video. He seems like a genius. You couldn’t have written a better build in tension.
Also, 1000th like! Nice.
It’s me, Nintendo. I must say, everyone involved in the making of this video have demonstrated great resiliency and dedication for the preservation to our franchise. It is CLEAR our games have touched your hearts in a very deep and meaningful way.
We will be sending you a cease and desist letter. Cut that shit out.
perfect nintendo impression
@@babylonian at its finest
nintendo wouldve striked this video because it has pokemon in it
@@capythanyna they would sue because the use of emulator
@@Real_Faygo nope, they would sue for cartridge dumping
The fact that Gary was not only leagues beyond overqualified, but the one, lone, necessary thread to figuring this out is mind-melting. It could ONLY be Gary, and you found him.
almost 8 billion people in the world and they found the only person who could do it
If you read this I hope you have a blessed day, friend
@@thomasrothbacher5849 it would have entirely ruined the point/ they wanted the exact same blastoise because almost every pokemon has a different "personality" which is that iv stuff they were doing
@@thomasrothbacher5849 if they just made a new one it would kind of just be like if you made an entirely different person that looks the same
@@orangemari pretty much like cloning, but your brain doesnt clone
gary is literally so nice and patient and charismatic, it's so cool to see someone so enthusiastic about something like this
Smell ya later
He sounds SO much like a younger Christoph Waltz
Definitely passionate about what he does
@@ButtKraken01 Except not at all German
I love how Gary just happened to have written the right tools for the job years ago
It's like lazy plot writing irl. Couldn't have been more right-person-at-right-time.
@@sansculottist yeah fr
that one in a million chance situation type shi
Gary coming in clutch
To be fair, the tools for Gen 3 ROM hacking and save editing have been around for almost as long as the games themselves have. There are LOADS of tools for hyper-specific purposes from the days of forums reigning king, to make ROM hacking and save editing more accessible to the layman who doesn't know how to go straight into the memory to change values. Of course it's been around for years.
It is nearly 1am. This was genuinely more gripping than anything on Netflix. Hearty well done to everyone involved.
SAME!!
I feel you
Gary is definitely a one in 7 billion kind of guy who was the best and probably only expert in his niche field and went well out of his way to help some guy he never met recover a long lost friend, he is the real pokemon champion.
He’s like Gary from the anime. He thinks he’s the best. This time, though, it’s true. He IS the best.
After you battle the elite 4, you must battle Gary
@@NoahStolee after you battle Albert Einstein, you battle gary
I admire this type of expert
Feelsgoodman
It doesn't even feel like the Blastoise was cloned. It feels like the Blastoise had lost its physical form and only the soul of it remained. Through this process, they gave Blastoise its body back. Now the Blastoise can continue the adventure she shared with Harrison 15 years ago.
The best thing? Since it was the same blastoise as the one in the hall of fame, it must have the gen 3 ribbon for beating the champion.
If you transfer it all the way to Sword and Shield, it'll have the title: "Blastoise the Champion"
Alphonse Elric type beat
@@Luchux177 Now this makes the already existing smile on my face even wider. This Blastoise truly is a champion. And I hope this story is remembered for years to come.
It'll just be in the cloud. No more adventures.
Do you mean "HARRISO" by chance?
Gary is the kind of person who'd work for a software company, be the only guy who knows how the company's 60-year-old mission-critical hardware works, and be impossible for them to lay off because the company would collapse.
You say that but some stupid bosses out there would find a way to fire him anyways. Probably because they're new management.
@@PhantomPr1me Eeeh. I disagree. Twitter is sick and needs a lot of surgery
@@PhantomPr1me 7500 people were employed for a social media site 😭 they didnt need to be on pay roll to sit and do nothing every day. elon stated that they were workers he had watched do very little and they arent needed for a company to work.
He is but said company would lay him off for 7 other losers and then regret it
@@Taygon45 lol yup
Gary didn't have too help this random dude but after every obstacle he didn't give up and looks like he solved it in a decent amount of time. dude is a genius!
"Finally, a challenge worth my time and skills"
-Gary, probably
I fucking broke down crying when Gary said “I FOUND IT”. He’s a genuine sense of accomplishment from helping Harrison. He bashed his head against the wall all day to do something most would consider futile, frivolous. We need more peeps like Gary
Agreed, the coolest part about it was how invested everyone got. Very wholesome stuff.
Bro but when he yelled WE HAVE IV’S i acctually smiled
we really do need more people like Gary
Gary is the best
when they found the Iv's and the pokemon became legal, the feeling i felt... the happiness.. you can't even state how intense that feels.
I think this is my new favorite video on the internet. Pokemon was such an important part of my life growing up and seeing someone have a moment like that was absolutely heartwarming. Absolute 10/10, from start to finish.
Pokmon
@@Campobleh pøkmån
Gary could shut down a whole nation with his skill, but hes just there and saves a pokemon shout out
Bro he took out the elite four low diff.
In the Pokemon world the elite four is considered the government of their world which basically is a control of a nation.
The chance to find the exact iv values were 1 in 887, 503,681
Would take some computation time, but this seems reasonable to bruteforce if you write a script
@@epoggg3672yea i thought the same, bruteforcing would be guaranteed but take more time
Oh, that's not as bad as I thought.
Idk why but garry's enthusiasm for what he does brings me so much joy
He's very optimistic sounding
Yeah sad we dont know the dude.
Same
@@stickbugging yeah I would really like to met him and possibly learn something from him, he seems like a nice person
WE FOUND THE IVs is my new War Cry from now on
The fact that it was Gary (Blue) who is clutch in saving the Blastoise is also so perfect. Gary went on to become a Pokemon researcher so to have Oaks Grandson come back to save a long lost Squirtle (Blastoise) is just so poetic.
not to mention the friend providing the technology which caused the problem all those years ago was named bill lmao
@verastone3817 😂 true that's wild
The Blastoise who beat him no less
God, headcanon is now Gary is a pokemon saver, as a glitch in the matrix of all in the pokemon universe.
One that he grew up with as a rival too
Gary is a god damn genius. Seriously, its not even just his knowledge, or his programming skills, it's his ingenuity and problem solving that is just next level.
Gary in the anime: Bye loser
Gary in real life: Ok im gonna try and help you revive your dead blastoise
Gary is a god programming genius I agree
All hail gary
It's honestly not _that_ hard, from the programming side. I know about endianness and text encodings, and I could figure most of this stuff out. He was just flexing with his "bit masks", too; the "09" identifying it as Blastoise was already clearly visible in that value.
Definitely kudos to the guy for researching into these savegames enough to know where and how to get all that data out, though. That's the _real_ skill.
Gary = Techno Sorcerer.
My friend recommended me this video, that was an hour well spent.
A guy who take a day off to another states to save his childhood Pokemon.
A guy who would like to support and spectate how his friend rescue his childhood Pokemon.
A guy who put in so much time to prepare and make this video possible and good.
A guy who is so passionate in Pokemon and software, he can troubleshoot all the unsolvable problems in Gen3.
You don't have any friends nerd
Ugh I got actual chills when those IVs were found. Crazy how generations were affected by these games, grew into the software geniuses, video gamers, and creative nerds we are out of pure love. Such a wild and beautiful journey, kudos to all involved.
144p 👍
Gary is the type of guy who makes you believe in humanity again. Imagine he had no gain in this but was totally invested with all his heart and passion. Thank you to everyone involved in this!
I thought of that too. Bless this guy! He only wanted to help as he wanted to help.
no gary is jesus
The almost 'paradoxical' thing about this though is that if he never corrupted this Blastoise to begin with he probably wouldn't have the same attachment to it. He's attached to it because of the memory of regret around it. Maybe he wouldn't even have cared about it or the game anymore... He might not even have kept the game or console if it weren't for his hope of fixing this mistake one day. Regret is a powerful emotion.
Bigger question that “would my Blastoise mean without the corruption?” is “would I be different without this formative event?”
That, and would harambe still be “harambe” if not for the fatal shot? 🦍 👼
I kinda beg to differ. The Pokémon that carried me through my first game was very important to me as a 10yr old. Because I didn't corrupt him I was able to transfer him to future generations which means I've had him for over 14 years now and my attachment to him has only grown. He's been with me so long I'd be *devastated* to lose him. Still, regret *is* powerful and probably did change the way this Pokémon is important to him.
@@BriarValley Same your favorite childhood Pokémon are huge attachments 😭 I can't help it
@@BriarValley what pokemon is it, I'm curious
@@harrykoeppel7684 wait a moment, you're the guy in the video aren't you! congrats man!
I'm 30 years old... watching this made me cry a little. The memories I had from that era aren't replicated today. When you didn't have friends to go hang out with, or anything to do; the pokemon games were there for you.
In December 1998 I was 14 and had a Blastoise and Dugtrio (my favorite pokemon too) who I loved so much. I remember they could beat the Elite 4 just the 2 of them. Level 100. We had an Accelerated Reader program at school that was for fun, where you read a book and take a 20 question test. You got extra credit if you scored well on it. One day during lunch, I took a test for a book I didn't read, Gulliver's Travels, and got a 5% (1/20) on it. I left the print out saying I failed in my backpack. My mom happened to go through my backpack one terrible, fateful morning, and thought I had actually failed a reading test. She got ultra mad, pulled me out of bed by my hair, and screamed at me for playing too much Pokemon as the reason why I failed a school assignment and didn't tell her. She took my Gameboy with the Pokemon Blue cartridge still in it, and smashed it with a hammer in front of me. I will never forget that morning.
dude… that is a heartbreaking story, BUT - the fact that you and i are both Dugtrio guys will bond us for eternity. thank you for sharing your tale, brother 🤝
I remember you telling that story on safety third I think, now it's even more tragic, RIP
Presenting to the emergency room, a recently deceased Pokemon Blue cartridge, smashed beyond repair due to misunderstood rage
One kid loved playing Pokemon too much, here is what happened to his Gameboy
Was this an asian mom syndrome? Did she ever say sorry and made up for the error?
gary must’ve been waiting his entire life for this exact moment. i can’t imagine how great it felt getting to use his skills for something like this.
@Mister MashupsYT I'd love to see/use that software! Since he mentioned this works for Gen II data structures, I have old Pokemon on a saved team on my Pokemon Stadium 2 game which are ghosts of the past. The saved file they were on no longer exists, but I use them on my saved teams for nostalgia.
"Gary" was the absolute MVP. His passion for these kind of things seeps throughout the video, and I love it!
Yes! This was definitely a passion-driven story for everyone involved
I love the enthusiasm of Gary. He is helping some random guy he doesn't know but you can hear the joy he has helping and making progress
It's just so poetically fitting that a water pokemon would be saved by initially dabbing water on the cartridge itself.
Well it's like a puddle, if you add enough water it becomes an ocean
I had a friend 20 years ago who used to spit in his game boy cartridge whenever it didn't work... and voila it worked! Lol
I always found it disgusting, so I was like, nah don't spit in it again. Let me try. And I took it out and blew into the cartridge and the game boy slot as much as I could, tried it 10 times and it never worked. I concluded that you know, this time your game is probably broken
He said, give it here. He spat in it and the first time he tries it, it works. I was like WTFFF. Why does nintendo want us to spit in it?
What if it was a ghost type
from the water she was born again.
As someone who JUST saved their Yellow cartridge... well, turns out the port I was using had a low voltage (4.6v). You can guess what fixed that...
I was not prepared to be so totally invested in the story of this Blastoise. Great editing btw!
When will you upload bruh
Same. I wasn't even expecting to watch the whole 1-hour-long thing. The narration and editing were brilliant.
Same holy deal was gonna play VR in my free time didn't check the time before and watched the whole thing man this was amazing
Same here. Seeing Harrison’s reaction to getting her back was really heartwarming
@@Adrian_Weekly he's not obligated to there's no need to be rude
what a crazy journey. the lengths you went to salvage a complete stranger's FIFTEEN year old digital companion is just totally mindblowing, and makes for such a beautiful narrated video to watch. makes me wish i actually backed up & archived my old pokémon emerald saves from 2008 too aha...
Reminds me of my old squirtle from firered. Ah, I miss noname.
Damn yahi still uses his main channel
wait.... yahi?!?!?!?!? this cant be real.... this.... cant.... you're not the right channel.... this ain't Yahiamice Live??!?!?!? could this be.... his main channel is active?!?!!??!!!? (this is a joke)
nurse joy got nothing, this guy the local witch doctor
I have the cartridge game but no gameboy. Will it work?
This is so wholesome and I dont know why. Seeing this guy care so much about something from when he was 7 makes me very happy.
As a developer and an engineer myself, I am really amazed by Gary. I’m mostly a jack of all trades, master of none, so seeing someone being an absolute master of an extremely narrow field is very inspiring.
I know right? Everything from the bitmask thing, the little software he wrote years ago, for some reason it makes me so happy. It shows an overview of "the toolkit" of every computer scientist/engineer
Software engineering is not real engineering
@@Karuska22ps yes it is
@@kano...777 it’s really easy and no it’s not
@@Karuska22ps try doing it then
i love the tiny clip put in for "yeah, you can turn pokemon into eggs." there was no point in putting such a goofy visual, which makes me love it.
LOL thank you for noticing and appreciating that! i don’t think anyone else did
@@babyloniani kinda loved it tbh
@@papyrusskeleton2331 timestamp?
@@Noob10346GD 24:29
Seal them back inside the egg then let it incubate
Gary is truly is a fitting name for this dude. He is confident and prideful of what he has done and he has every right to be.
Idk if prideful but proud
And the voice too
"Gary Gary, he's our man! If he can't do it, no one can!"
and his friends name is BILL
It's on purpose
19:15 "you my friend, have a successful dump on your hands" is a wild sentence. lmao
Harrison was on the verge of tears the whole video. you can tell that even though this was a really unimportant task in the grand scheme of things, it really means a lot to him.
Well said. I hope this episode highlights my perseverance and dedication to fixing issues!
@@harrykoeppel7684 dude did the blastoise ever make it off the cartridge? Dying to know
@@MikeHunt-ee4nn it would have yes PKHeX has better Legality Checking than official Pokemon legality checks I know this from experience.
If it means a lot to someone than, in my opinion, that’s all it takes for it to be important. If it brings someone true joy it’s worth preserving. :D
@@blueleader8323 I just meant as in, affecting most people, but I totally agree with you. All the money and power in the world doesn't matter if you aren't genuinely fulfilled.
Shout out to the other corrupted Pokémon who weren't fortunate enough to be saved. Blastoise shall carry on their legacy.
Catching a wild missingno. corrupted all my stored Pokemon. May this mild Blastoise shine as a light in the darkness of thousands of youthful hearts 🥲
The chosen. A beacon of hope in a world of darkness for the Pokémon that didn’t make it.
They were the clones who didn't make it, just like in the movie 🥲
Dang, that missingno claimed a lot of pokemon....RIP my beloved Blastoise, I'm so sorry buddy 😢 😞
Bro was cloned lowkey insane💀
All I gotta say is that I'd kill to be Gary's apprentice, just to learn these things. He stayed hopeful through this entire interaction and got the job done. I wanna be like that.... I want to learn to be like that.
I want that mind set.
@@thushant2409 then have it
@@thushant2409 put yourself in it!
Same here!! Like I'd pay that man to teach me! I refuse to find any other, Gary is the one of trust to put the money at. No questions asked.
@@MrHurricaneFloyd spoken like someone who is truly a prisoner to themselves, if you have any free will you have the option, if you can fathom the idea of changing you can change genuinely or ingeniously, it really doesn’t matter. As long as you have control you dictate your reactions.
This almost made me sob. It really does feel like reuniting with a lost or passed pet… great work from everyone
There's a real beautifully human kindness in people coming together to help with such a small but complicated problem. Thanks for the video, incredible work.
Nick come up with the most bizarre but best video ideas that anyone can relate to and understand. What a great creator.
Whenever I need to feel hope for the existence of human kindness, I watch a Nick Robinson video.
I love how you can hear how exited Gary is every time he works something out, it's lovely when you get into that puzzle-solving mode where it doesn't really matter anymore what you're solving, as long as you just solve it.
the nicest Gary
That's what it feels like to do something you love and get a positive solution
Yummy dopamine
This video was great, but the cloning discussion sequence was an absolute masterpiece
Oh hey there
So true. Even though half of the things went over my head, the technicality just astounded me.
Oh hi
Lol
My sad story of losing a beloved partner is with my Meowstic in X, my first pokemon game. His name was Tom I'm pretty sure...and i was going through my boxes one night frantically searching for him...and he wasn't there. I didn't remember trading OR releasing him, and now that I've actually discovered that I dissociate, (not diagnosed w anything but im looking into getting one) I very well couldve disossiated, traded or released him, and then switched back and had no idea it even happened, and like, i cried for hours over this
@@katiestrong385 I’m so sorry for your loss.
BRO GARY IS THE GOAT 😭 HE CAME IN CLUTCH AND KNEW THE MOST UNKNOWN CODE AND FIXED IT 😭😭
This is like diving into the river Styx, swimming all the way to the afterlife, finding a specific soul, and dragging it back to the world of the living.
The first thing that came to mind when I read this was Jeff Foxworthy saying "it's not yet your time. Go back"
This video is like a movie
It's like that one scene from Hercules
Don't look back
And the soul is that of a digital turtle.
This should honestly be a Feature length film.. the amount of suspence, the drama, the resolution,. ive never been so amazed.
1 hour is feature length.
@@carscientist no it’s not
I’ve watched this entire thing 3 times
@aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa6437 understandable, it is deeply understandable this is fucking fantastic.
Saving Blastoise: a pokemon documentary
Gary is the MVP.
His dedication to find a strangers Blastoise is so wholesome… Maybe Gary thought of his Blastoise and had to do something !
Gary had me very suspect at first; before hearing his voice I thought Nick was Gary himself setting up a bait and Switch. Then hearing his voice I slowly built a trust and confidence in Gary. Gary's cinematic universe is the Matrix. The fact he didn't even promote his social media or anything from it is also very commendable for whatever reason he withheld it. Ironically while playing God, only God knows what Gary really did to get that Blastoise back.
The love people have for things and just that people are willing to help even over something silly has me ugly crying
this man seriously spent 3 whole months to recover a random kids pokemon
what an absolute legend
Giganticest and chaddiest giga chad in the gigantic chad place that is the giga help zone.
since when did this have 400 likes and 1 reply?
technically 3 months for the video, seems like the actual action was over a single afternoon
@@tosmok that would make him the head of the gigachads, imagine pulling off all of this in under a day
GUYS WHY DOES THIS HAVE 900 LIKES WTF
i am a grown man, sitting here watching someone get his starter back while having tears in my eyes and i dont know why. this is such a great story - have fun with your old friend!
same, but with a huge smile too.
Its nice
You're not alone!
Omg i thought i was the only one, this was overwhelming to watch.
Death denial at its finest, that's why.
Really resonated with you guys, I’ve got my own story of losing my special Pokémon…
The first two Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games are my favorite games of all time, the MOST influential in my life to this day… Blue Rescue Team was the first game I ever finished and my partner Pokémon I legit viewed as my best friend, the connection was so strong. My parents still tease me to this day about me running downstairs crying when I beat the game because “I had to leave my friend” :’) totally beautiful masterpiece haha
Anyways, my brother REALLY wanted a turn playing and my mom FORCED me to let him have a turn on my game. I begrudgingly handed it over and he somehow ended up on the “delete save” screen that looked identical to the “continue save” screen. He was like “what do I do” so I just pressed what I thought was ‘continue’ and watched the save file get deleted before my very eyes.
One of my most traumatic childhood memories ^^; anyways, loved the video + the happy ending!!
fuck, phia, that’s brutal! but i’m glad you enjoyed the video :’)
the perks of being an only child.
dangg, what was your pokemon?
Same. Except I lost my copy of MD on vacation to Greece because there was a hole in my backpack on the way to the airport. So I really lost everything.
@@Seafowl i never have to worry about that because my sister is 23
Gary is the OG props on him for doing this without giving up
I clicked on this video thinking "this seems like a chill video to fall asleep too" I watched the whole thing. Invested by every twist and turn. Every roadblock you hit and overcome just to reunite two friends after 15 years and it couldn't have been more beautiful. I don't think it's cloned, you allowed it to escape the void of corruption that had trapped it all them years ago. Honestly Gary is a goat, no question asked. Overqualified doesn't cut it. Honestly I didn't expect to cry but I did. I love wholesome interactions like this and it's one of the many great things about the internet. I hope after all these years, Harrison takes blastoise on more memorable adventures.
I lost my childhood partner, Pidgeot when I used a GameShark. I got stuck in a house after saving because when I loaded the game a tree spawned in again. I didn't know about any kind of walk through walls stuff, as I was just eight and the internet wasn't something I even had back then. I stayed in that house for days trying to figure out something to do, but ultimately I just decided I would have to restart my game. I felt so sad because Pidgeot and the rest of my team were a big part of how I got through my parents divorce. It was a pleasant part of a very unpleasant part of my life. It still makes me sad to this day. Stuff really does stick with you extra hard emotionally speaking when you're a child.
Pidgeot was my main pokemon on my first playthrough on blue i had a thing about making non starters my main. But that must have sucked back then to happen to you
I got through my parents divorce with pokemon too. Typhlosion in heartgold, Blaziken in sapphire, Venusaur in leafgreen. They got 7 year old me through that bad time.
Poor you!
Love you bro heads up king💕
Man im sorry
I started crying around 53:20. When I clicked this video, I wasn't expecting the documentary-style at all, or Harrison to come visit you in person to complete this project, or the discussion about whether a cloned Pokemon is identical to the origianal.
To the person who helped datamine the games and provided his expertise during the resurrection process? you literally helped resolve Harrison's most longstanding personal regret. I was about to type that your dedication, for helping a complete stranger with such a, to most people, trivial problem, is amazing, but that feels grossly inadequate, and is selling your kindness short.
Emotional incontinence is not a virtue. You are either lying or have un unreal level of mental instability by watching a cloned digital asset be made through an editor designed to do just that. Jesus did not rise from the dead or perform miracles. Is this why the world needs safe spaces and the like? Please my friend, get some help.
@@Wr41thgu4rd Who shit in your bed
@@Wr41thgu4rd chill
@@Wr41thgu4rd any person woulda felt a lil sum sum deep down. there’s something about it that just hits.
@@Wr41thgu4rd wth dude, people like you make me sad.
man garry sounds exactly how i imagined pokemon garry to sound like
Gary is hell of a genius and good guy.
There are experts, then there are experts who solves problem like no one else.
Cleaning contacts… everyone should know that trick with carts. It’s like basic electronics.
Dude not only showed why he is a goat but he did it just to be kind. Props to everyone especially Gary
@@michaelreynolds3179 As said above, there is nothing goat about cleaning contacts
Fact that a piece of code he wrote 15 years ago saved it is unbeliavable
@@leeartlee915you’re acting like that’s the only thing he did
Imagining this from Blastoise's perspective: you're going on a journey with your trainer, you've entered the hall of fame together, helped capture mewtwo and have scoured the entire region together. One day you start to feel strange, you suddenly feel a surge of strange energy, like you've eaten a rare candy but something is wrong. It's too much at once and everything goes black. For years you're stuck in stasis, possibly aware of the world around you as your trainer desperately tries to bring you back.
And then one day, you wake up again to the sound of cheers and laughter
Cool, cool, I'm emotional now. Thanks.
Sad thing is that blastoise is probably still in stasis/dead. But at least his legacy will go on with this new blastoise who is essentially the same
@@Criselyon you know, you could have not said that. We would have been happier if you had not said that. But you still said it.
@@Criselyon Not quite, the reconstructed data directly overwrote the bad egg. It's more like the corpse of the corrupted blastoise was melted down and re-assembled into an identical one.
@@Criselyon FUCKING WRONG
The fact that Harrison puts his hat on backwards, like Ash before a battle, when Blastoise was recovered made me so happy :)
Automatic
@@harrykoeppel7684 real?
@@ewanb1086 He's got one video and it's about a baseball they were thrown. Pretty sure it's legit.
@@ZiddersRooFurry yeah it seems
Time stamp?
I never cried so hard… to see a long lost friend be brought back to life exactly how it was. It touched my heart and than some. I didn’t think something like this could be possible but to watch it happen is beyound breath taking. Congrats on getting your friend back brother !!!! Take good care of her and i want to know when you hit lvl 100 !!!
46:22 Since you wanted it, here you go. One IV has 31 different possibilities with only 1 of them being the correct one, essentially a 1/31 chance. There’s 6 IV’s, meaning that the probably would be 1/31^6 or 1/887,503,681.
If you want that as a percentage: 0.000000113%
So basically you would have been able to guess the exact amount of XP on the Blastoise before actually getting the IV’s correct. Gary saved a lot of trouble with his findings, because this may have become a many years endeavor of you just hitting randomize until it goes away.
I think you've been too pessimistic...
31^6 is "just" 887,503,681. I think brute forcing less than a billion values, with an ad hock piece of code, could be done in a day. Possibly even a few minutes, depending on the complexity of the checking algorithm, which I assume has not been deliberately hardened against a brute force attack.
Damn that math is monumental, it would have taken ages
Would it have been more likely that everyone involved in this would get struck by lightning?
If you take the time to do the division (on a calculator, of course.) it comes out to approximately 10 years assuming you clicked it once per second and were guaranteed to get it once you had clicked it 2,176,782,336 times. Also Matteo Falduto was correct in his correction and that number of 887,503,861 would take, under the same assumptions about 4 years.
Sorry, I only speak English, could you repeat that?
This was so much more emotional than anticipated. Welcome home, Blastoise!
I lost a LVL 100 Pikachu to a crushed PokeWalker when I was 10. I couldn't even touch Soul Silver after that, until a full year later when I was looking through the instruction booklet and found the code to retrieve a Pokemon from a PokeWalker.
Felt like a pitt in my heart had been restored
@JhonSierra_117 irl daycare training
I can relate to this so deeply because of the Safefile I lost by dropping my Gameboy color with Pokemon Red in it and my lvl ~60 Charizard with earthquake on it, I think i was 10 at that time.
transferred a level 98 raichu from leaf green to pearl and my mom sold my copy of pearl a few years back…keeps me up at night to this day
I similarly thought my own Pokémon was lost forever when my Pokéwalker got crushed. When I figured it out and brought back my Weezing, I actually hugged my DS.
Dont spoil
I watched the whole hour. This is one of those moments we may not all experience, but to see someone else achieve it makes us a better human. I am glad he was able to recover what was once lost
i didn’t even realize it was an hour until i read this
I usually skip videos forward but this video was special to watch fully
Oh my God I just watched an hour long video and got so invested I didn't even realize.
@@3yAzure holy shit i thought it was like 25 minutes😂
@@3yAzure I was literally going to say this exact thing. I didn't realize I was watching this for an hour until it ended lmao
im crying. i feel like this kind of thing is such a relatable experience with every person. we all did something dumb in our childhood that we regret. if we could go back in undo it… we all would.
The amount of rare videos on UA-cam that take you on an emotional journey, emphasizes the fact of how rare they are. But this is definitely one of those videos
thank you very much! i’m glad our video made you feel something :)
gary’s knowledge is crazy impressive and its really nice that he decided to help out with this, what a genuinely cool person
Ikr! Gary's knowledge just blew me away! I didn't even think this was possible. Just shows the sheer amount of work they have put into this project of bringing an old friends back to life! Big up everyone they did a phenomenal job!!
Nick paid him in verified Shiny Gen 1 Mew's + BTC.
His voice is nice, too, he's the kind of person I could listen to talk about anything because he's just so enthusiastic, you can tell he really enjoys doing this sort of thing!
You guys were able to heal one of this man’s horrible childhood core memories and it’s great you can see the instant happiness in his face when he logged in that pc and seen it sitting there it was great
No cure can't heal his childhood wounds from being forced to load the game again and again in desperate agony covered in the dark black as the DEEPEST pit
As someone who is learning software dev and has recently been rekindling my kid nostalgia for Pokémon, the UA-cam algorithm really came together for this one.
This Gary... however you found him, he has a wealth of eclectic knowledge that just needs a little resources in the right places to make him an icon in the Pokemon world. Bless this mad lad.
its just not that deep
@@CP9Des L
Given how much he knows there is a fair chance he's already well-known under a different name. The only people who have a reason to know this much about pokémon data structures are romhackers (speaking as a former romhacker who had a moderate following on 4chan more than a decade ago myself). Nintendo's treatment of fan projects and the people who make them, and the occasional nasty element in that community, may also be why he wished to remain anonymous for this video, since he appears in it with things that might be able to connect him to his work enough to start picking at his identity and dox him, like the fact that he's swedish and even the formants in his voice.
@@CP9Des L
@@CP9Des compared to me in your mum, sure
I ve studied engineering and met people in the level of gary, at the very first instant he told you that "maybe" it was possible, I knew what was coming, people like him are really inspiring!
This right here is what makes you one of my favourite content creators. Didn't expect to be so invested in a near hour long video about something like this, but it's the authenticity, the passion and excellent storytelling that makes this channel so special. The twists and turns, the wholesome ending, this vid has it all.
Except for that one time he lied about not getting a cartridge on japanese ebay to drive suspense. Then later in the video fessed up, because the tension needed to go somewhere. So yes.... knows how to tell a story.
@TheSportsGuru who said I was complaining? Its a good twist...... I just saw it coming a mile away when I glanced down at the run time. :P
Why this the best documentary I’ve seen this year thus far 😂😅 loved it !!!! Thank you for this
As a guy who wants to be a Computer Scientist,Gary is now my newest role model
Same brother, same
Same bro
Follow your dreams dude!
same
Same
I will never forget being in second grade, riding in back seat of the car, discovering the meaning of the word "release"... I hope you lived a good life in the wild, Fearow; you are still missed.
Being in the second grade and not knowing what words mean can cause the absolute worst things to happen
Had the same experience with a fennekin back in 2014
Same with my starter on first grade 🥲
"Are you sure?"
“No way I’m watching this entire hour video”
*watches entire video*
I want to give Gary a hug, buy him a beer, give him money…everything. That guy was such a cool dude. If you ever see this, we may not know each other but I love you bro. That work you put in made my soul smile. Stay cool
Igualmente
saaame i was like fuk its 3 in the morning no way im watching this 1h vid now. was about to turn it off glad i didnt. Great video!!
3m people: *yes*
Maybe just watch it on 1.25 speed 😂
Lmao so accurate, the blastoise kid was too genuine, I gave too much of a shit.
This was such a very well pieced together video. So well pieced together that I might just rewatch it again tomorrow because Gary's knowledge on the file structure of Pokemon is INSANE.
"Strong Pokémon. Weak Pokémon. That is only the selfish perception of people. Truly skilled trainers should try to win with their favorites. I like your style. You understand what's important." You truly understand how important just one Pokemon can be to someone. It's incredible what you've done to help out someone who cared so deeply about a long lost friend.
Stolen from Heartgold and Soulsilver 🤣
@@dylantingley9400 mf thinks quoting is stealing
@@epilepticsquid8856 mf doesn't know what a joke is 😂
Lmao epic line
-elite 4's ''karen''.
This really is phenomenal. The fact that you came into contact with the exact person who could have fixed this problem is beyond words. 32 year old man sitting in my room crying happy tears thinking about my own childhood Blastoise. Saw someone else say it but this is may be my favorite video on the internet now.
If there is anything I care enough about, on the level of how much he cared for his pokemon, I hope I never lose it. This was a journey. I, too, am a 32 year old man. This is gold.
I'm kinda tearing up with the ending. Gary is a hero 👏. When I was a kid I used a GameShark and accidently turned my blastoise into a spearow ☠. Such i great video and story. Im a shiny hunter and I am going to shiny hunt a squirtle and name it Harriso💙
Reply with a pic!
Why is this the best put together video I’ve ever watched in my life. The camera work and effects are incredible. Nice work. I will be watching in the future
It was so good watching him putting the cartridge in the GB. Whoever Gary is, he is a total beast, huge respect for spending his time helping them out!
gary went from cocky pokémon trainer to to gym leader to pokemon professor to bypassing the laws of his own games and saving a lost blastoise outside his fabric of reality
You gotta love Gary for being so enthusiastic for this project and how he gets hype over all the little victories
This dude Gary deserves some kind of prestigious award for his efforts. This entire thing was simply incredible. Easily one of the best videos I’ve watched on UA-cam.
in 2004, i was 4 years old and had my venusaur that i kept throughout my entire journey. In 2022, i still have the same venusaur. god i feel so good for this guy
damn, that rules! congrats man
Make sure to backup it because the battery
@@the_mariocrafter the gba carts dont save with battery but gbc and gb games do. Otherwise its flash save
Introduction / Issue - 00:00
Part 1 - Dumping the Cartridge - 11:32
Part 2 - Opening the Save in PKHEX - 13:56
Part 3 - Exploring His Memories - 20:19
Part 3.5 - Trying "A-SAVE" - 25:51
Part 4 - "A Jurassic Park Situation" - 34:41
Part 5 - Endgame - 41:47
Bump
Or watch the whole thing
@@flightjam but what if we actually did and we wanna go to a certain part
@〫 Your mum 〫 part 3
@〫 Your mum 〫 15:03, 20:21 they used mGBA if that's what you wanted to know.
"Your childhood cartridge?"
"Yes."
"Anything children touch becomes filthy. Clean it. Now."
_Cleans the cart and it works again_
-The story of countless cartridge repairs
Understandable. Bought a few used GBC carts from Japan a few weeks ago. They glitch out when I plug it into my GBC for the first time.
Pulled it out, contact cleaner on tissue paper, and the carts worked fine after a few passes of contact cleaner and tissue.
@@RAMChYLD Yeah
Had a local retro game shop advise me to clean a game I bought from them if it doesn’t work since they were lazy to do it themselves. Never saw a NES game be so filthy beforehand
I'm assuming very faint grime slowly built up on the cart which is why it wouldn't dump correctly.
@@RAMChYLD That's why I preemptively clean all used cartridges I buy, to avoid filthing up the port as that would be harder to clean. And also because I just don't like having dirty cartridges.
this was finding a way to reunite with his friend. pet, ally. inspiring
This is so Wholesome.
We need a Netflix-style series of Pokemon being "saved" from corrupt files.
Next episodes: this Blastoise jumping from LG all the way to modern consoles until Pokemon Shield.
Not just Pokemon, but video games in general.
nah hulu would do it better
No lets bring it to real life
Pokemon shining pearl maybe?
its so sad that someone could do this with their lost childhood pokemon and not be able to transfer it because of the incomplete dex
For those who are curious the odds of them randomly selecting the correct ivs was about 1/32^6 or 1/1,073,741,824. So it was unlikely to say the least.
If you have to randomly guess them, correct. But actually, they are maybe less: a couple of Blastoise's IVs were 31 and that shouldn't be a case. At some point in the series starters and legendaries were generated with some maxed IVs. Btw, there are still too many combinations to try.
@@pinckerman Yes and no. You could program something to test them all in a matter of minutes. 1 billion combinaisons for a computer is nothing.
Thank you I really was curious
English people i can't 💀
Not saying you're wrong, but could you show a bit more of the maths behind it.
Producing those IV values was like cloning down to a quantum level with the correct position and energy of the electrons...
Literally a digital soul. No real discernable affect on character or appearance but that is what is used to determine whether or not it may be saved within the cloud. Now that an excellent(if unintentional) parallel.
This is legitimately a Netflix-worthy drama. I became fully emotionally invested in this to the point that I felt like that was MY Blastoise being rescued from all that corrupted code. All the setbacks and tense moments had me holding my breath, tapping my fingers, or doing that thing you do when you’re anxious where you blow air out of your mouth. Every little breakthrough that brought them a little closer to rescuing Harrison’s Blastoise had me doing a fist pump, going, “Yus,” cheering, or just getting super excited. All the crazy endeavors and tricks that were needed to bring her back just blew my mind. And the moment they manage to somehow finally dig her out of her corrupted prison, IVs intact and all, is incredible. The philosophical twists on this just adds to the cinematic vibes of this whole thing.
After all, what is DNA but organic computer coding? What is computer coding but synthetic DNA? This was simply an incredible experience to watch!
Oh and just FYI… all the cells and components of our bodies are replaced on a regular basis. Meaning we’re no longer made up of ANY of the same stuff physically we used to be. Old cells die and are replaced with new ones. Old hairs fall out and new ones grow in. But we’re still considered the same person and our DNA is still exactly the same. That is absolutely still the same Blastoise. I wonder… When Harrison transfers her into more modern Pokémon games, what flavor of food will she like? :P
Not sure why you'd insult this amazing video by calling it Netflix worthy. This is too good to be on Netflix next to the child porn and transphobic "comedy" specials.
@@mjc0961 yeah, I should have worded it differently, fully agree. It’s streaming service-worthy for sure though!
@@mjc0961 the WHAT
@@mjc0961 Didnt see that one coming 😂😂😂
Wasn't expecting to burst into tears multiple times over someone else's lost pokemon but this video really hit home for me. I lost 100+ hours of work on my Pokemon Blue game as a kid when my mom forced me to let some younger kids play with it and the little bastards saved over my game despite me telling them repeatedly that they can play as long as they don't save 😭😭😭
Yeah, thinking back to my many lost pokemon saves makes me feel like I'm gonna cry...
Add that example to why sharing isn't always caring, the main reason why my PS2 was busted. My brothers back then literally can't handle it with care
omg this is so true. siblings ruined my saves multiple times before
Yeah I accidentally left Pokémon red at my cousins house and my aunt mailed it back to me, and when I put the game in, it turned out she saved over it😭
SAME!
Oof sorry those younger kids killed your save.
I'm going to go find my first ever Pokémon Fraligator that I moved from Soul Silver to White.
I think the fact that this man found the Blastoise with some software that HE HIMSELF wrote over half a decade ago and hasn't released is probably the biggest flex of 2022.
makes me wonder if this will spark them to publish said software. albeit a very niche use, it could genuine save hundreds of other pokemon
main character energy for sure
Not probably, definitely
Pls release it Gary !
The attachments Pokémon fans have to their Pokémon, especially their starters is honestly rlly heartwarming