Year: 2004-2010
Date of Archival: Coming soon…
Run by: TRRose
Originally hosted at: www.trsrockin.com
Status: Incomplete
Archive Link: Coming soon…
Team Rocket’s Rockin’ was once the ultimate way to find stories of corrupted game cartridges, strange glitch Pokemon, cities that shouldn’t be, and moves that shouldn’t exist. On the surface, this was a Team Rocket website, but when you dig deep it ended up becoming so much more.
As David Wonn’s site and The Odyssey of Hyrule both showed, people were hungry to find glitches and oddities and speedrun tricks in games. Pokemon was also one of the biggest schoolyard phenomenons of the time, so a Pokemon site that eventually became a haven for people to share their glitch experiences was only natural. The sheer amount of information that was spread through this site is what made it really something special. TRRose/Mandy cultivated a site full of explorers and weirdos all searching for the elusive Missingno. and M-Block, and in turn provided a treasure trove of peeks into Pokemon Red and Blue’s spaghetti code as well as people’s personal experiences glitching the heck out of their games.
It also lead to a lot of fabricated truths and half-formed memories, but that’s all part of the fun, isn’t it? One of those lies may or may not have been sent in by me…once again using my dad’s email, if I recall correctly. I haven’t checked yet to see if that’s still there…
Along with the usual Team Rocket love and mountains of Pokemon glitches, TR’s Rockin’ also hosted creative works galore, especially from a bunch of people who loved these little Glitch Pokemon and “PokeGods”. Fanfics, fanart, fan theories…baked goods?! This place had it all! Nowadays, it’s easy to datamine games and figure out why a game behaves as it does, but when this site was at its peak, it felt like new discoveries were being made every day. I’ll never forget the elation I felt one day in high school chemistry class when I pulled this website up furtively to find that they had determined that what you entered for your name could determine what type of glitched Pokemon spawned on the Cinnabar coast.
This website, just like the internet of yore, was all about passionate discovery. The fun part is that I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, at least about this website. In fact, it has already been partially archived here. [Editor’s Note: Not anymore…] That said, there are pages I’ve noticed are missing and I wanted to take a crack at archiving it myself as best as I possibly could. It was an indispensable wealth of knowledge for so many back in the day, and more than that…it was all just so fun. The way I yelped the first time I pulled off Glitch City…magical.
Anyway, as I said, what I want to try to do with this one is to make it as complete as possible. This one is interesting because there’s a LOT that was archived, and through some finagling I’ve been able to find pages that weren’t even backed up on the mirror up there. It’ll take a bit, especially because it’s one of the larger sites, but I hope one day to add it to the archives.