The Old Man Glitch - Bug Escalation in Pokémon
summary
A concrete exploit chain in Pokémon Red/Blue on Game Boy: a buffer overwrite of the player name is written into the encounter table, producing a use‑after‑free read of stale encounter data that corrupts item and Pokédex counters (yielding values like 128 or 255). By combining in‑game actions, save editing, and the trade/name mechanics, the attacker crafts data so that item ID 0x8F is used to jump to injected code and achieve arbitrary code execution (examples include walking through walls and running payloads across cartridges).
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:12Old Man Glitch
- 3:44Bug origin and impact
- 8:01Cascade error analysis
- 13:34Bug exploitation and effects
- 20:00Data and item manipulation
- 25:38Code injection demo
- 31:19Practical demo and payload
- 37:28Bug escalation summary
- 39:57Conclusion
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