Games

Pokemon GO Glitch Shows Chansey Defending a Gym for Over 50 Years

Published

2 months ago

October 11, 2024

Christoph Rediske

Key Takeaways

Glitch shows Chansey defending gym for 55 years.
Bug related to Unix time, not actual defense time.
Players amused by meme-worthy glitch, with no harm done.

A Pokemon GO player shared a weird glitch that indicated that their Chansey had been defending a Pokemon Gym for over 50 years. The odd moment has an explanation, but it’s nonetheless amusing the community to think about defending a Gym in Pokemon GO for that long.

Pokemon GO Gyms are a key part of gameplay. If a Pokemon Gym falls under a certain team’s control, players on that team can leave their Pokemon to defend it, and it will return to them when the Gym is taken over by someone else. For many players, Pokemon return home almost immediately, while other defending Pokemon can end up stuck for months, if not years. However, this Chansey has supposedly been defending a gym since long before Pokemon came to exist.

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Pokemon fan Frunchise shared a screenshot from their account that showed the details on their Pokemon defending gyms. All but one of the Pokemon have normal defending times ranging from a couple hours to as long as nine days. However, their Chansey named Pillow, according to the game, has been defending its position for 20,006 days, 13 hours, 45 minutes, and 5 seconds. In other words, the Chansey has allegedly been defending a single gym for nearly 55 years – about twice as long as the Pokemon series as a whole has even existed.

Come Home Already, Chansey

Clearly, Chansey hasn’t actually been defending a Pokemon Gym since 1969/1970. This particular bug likely has something to do with the default time set on many computers and programs. Unix time, which is frequently used in computing, calculates time based on how many seconds have passed since 1/1/1970. For whatever reason, as the Chansey was getting kicked out of its gym after defending for roughly nine actual days, the time display became glitched and showed how much time had passed since 1/1/1970, rather than when the Chansey was actually dropped off.

While this was just a harmless glitch, fans have been quite amused by it, joking about how long the Chansey has been defending with various memes. Others have taken the opportunity to poke at how the rewards for defending gyms in Pokemon GO work, saying that the Chansey would have spent all that time for a mere 50 PokeCoins. However, some pointed out that Pokemon GO players have no way to bring home a defending Pokemon without it being defeated, which is considered a problem by many fans. Players should act with caution when choosing to defend a Pokemon Gym, but thankfully, no one should have to expect to welcome their Pokemon back 50 years later.

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