>>37254213Yes, that's gimping the game. If they had removed the gameplay entirely I'm sure they could have fit all the Pokemon, yay.
As I recall, their first idea was to have 350 pokemon, then they downsized their plan to 250. Then they started development, and at some point learned that 250 wasn't going to work, so they downsized again to 190, which is the number of slots for Pokemon in the game. Near the end of development, it became clear that even that wasn't going to fit, so they scrapped another 40. They couldn't remove the in-between slots without breaking the game however, so they just left them empty, which is what the MissingNo are.
When they finished the game with 150, they had to space left on the cart, they removed the dev-tools and could fit one more, so they did.
All of this info can be found in interviews and the documentary.
