Pokemon Go fans crowdsource hunt for game’s final, elusive Pokemon, Ditto

Tens of millions of Pokemon Go players worldwide are catching Pokemon and exploring the game's limits at all hours of the day, all over the planet. You'd think someone would've found Ditto by now. Yet no one has.

He's the elusive #132 in the Official Pokemon Pokedex – the encyclopedia of all official Pokemon, and the backbone of Pokemon Go. His number slot is there in your in-game Pokedex, and folks have even dug into the game's code and found plenty of evidence that he's in the game.

The chief executive of the studio behind the game, John Hanke, recently said: “I couldn't tell you how to find Ditto, because it wouldn't be any fun if I did. It will happen for you, I promise.”

Excluding Legendary Pokemon – which are said to be coming at some point, likely in a bigger way than simply being capturable – Ditto is the only Pokemon of the original 151 represented in the game that's yet to be found. 

Fans of the augmented-reality mobile phone game think there's a good reason for that: the nature of Ditto. Look no further than – what else? – the Pokedex for more on this logic.

“Ditto rearranges its cell structure to transform itself into other shapes. However, if it tries to transform itself into something by relying on its memory, this Pokemon manages to get details wrong.”

Of course! As Reddit user “validproof” explains, when Ditto was introduced originally (on the Pokemon cartoon in the 1990s), it was a sort of mutant Pikachu.