Unterminated player name

This article is incomplete. Please feel free to add any missing information about the subject. It is missing: The effect of an unterminated player name in other games (if there is no notable effects, maybe the wiki should explicitly say so after research).

Some glitches can remove the terminating character in the name of the player character. The exact consequences of this may vary between different games. In particular, in Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow, the game will not recognize a save file with an unterminated player game, causing the save file to be lost.

In Generation I

In Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow, the player's name is internally stored as a 11-byte string (even though when naming the character, the maximum length allowed is 7). Therefore, if any of the 11 characters in the player's name is a terminating 0x50 character, then the name is considered terminated; otherwise, the name is unterminated.

If the player saves the game while having an unterminated player name, then after resetting, the game will not recognize a save file exists, and will instead display a main menu with no "Continue" option, as if the cartridge had never been played before. This is why glitches like Super Glitch and the ZZAZZ glitch has the potential of erasing the player's save file if the player saves the game after triggering them.

Note that this effect is different from what happens if the player has a terminated name but the save file has a wrong checksum: In the latter case the game will display the message "The file data is destroyed!" before displaying the main menu with no "Continue" option. In fact, this happens exactly because the game checks whether the player name in the save file is terminated in order to distinguish between a non-existing save file (which may be from uninitialized SRAM data, and has some degree of unpredictability) and a corrupt save file.