"I don't think of it as borrowing Nintendo's ," Involuntary Twitch says. Marshall's Phoenix Rising has been in development for seven years and is slated to release its first episode later this year.īut in light of the DMCA takedowns of Pokémon Uranium, and when years of your blood, sweat, and tears are on the line, why risk making a Pokémon game at all? But, almost miraculously, a few of those projects survived to near-completion. Looking at the likes of Phoenix Rising or Uranium, it's hard to imagine that such ambitious games came from the idle tinkering of teenagers, but it's a common theme among many of the fan game developers I spoke with. With this software, even those without an advanced knowledge of programming could build their own version of Pokémon. In 2007, a programmer by the username of 'Poccil' created a scriptbase for the lightweight game engine RPG Maker XP called Pokémon Essentials. Phoenix Rising subverts Pokémon tropes by not featuring gyms or the Elite Four.īut hacked roms have serious limitations and are akin to trying to write a novel by reorganizing the pages of an already existing one. "We came together in the sense that we love playing Pokémon games and we all want to put our stamp on what we'd want to see in the main series," he says. That's where Gavin Marshall, the game director on Pokémon Phoenix Rising, first began experimenting with building his own Pokémon game. Over the years, hundreds of these hacked roms circulated the internet-each one a unique perspective on what its creator loved about Pokémon. When emulation made it possible to play Pokémon games on PC, it didn't take long before fans began hacking those roms, reassembling and modifying the bits and pieces to build their own version of a Pokémon game.
That feeling of crafting your own narrative is something that fans of Pokémon carry with them outside of the games into their communities."įor most, that meant roleplaying new adventures on forums or posting original fan art and custom Pokémon designs. The Pokémon you catch, the battles you fight, it always feel unique. "Every time you have a Pokémon adventure, it's totally different from every other time you play a game. "There's some kind of universal element to every kind of Pokémon game that's all about making your own stories," Involuntary Twitch says.
The premise of one day leaving behind the comforts of home to explore a world full of magical creatures wasn't just captivating, it was inspiring.
When the animated series and subsequent Game Boy games kicked off the first golden age of Pokémon, it captured the imagination of an entire generation. Many of these projects owe their existence to the early Pokémon forum boards of the '90s. Pokémon Phoenix Rising, for example, incorporates a much more involved storyline with branching quests. Right now, there are at least a dozen fan games being developed by people just like Involuntary Twitch and JV-each one with its own unique spin on the Pokémon universe. Pokémon Uranium might be the one fan game on everyone's lips, but it's only a small portion of a much larger Pokémon community. Official development halted late that year, but unofficially, Uranium is still alive and well with periodic updates if you know where to look.Pokemon Uranium features new Nuclear-type Pokémon that are irradiated version of their regular forms. Unfortunately, that popularity caught the attention of Nintendo and the Uranium devs were served DMCA notices by Nintendo of America.
Pokemon Uranium had its full release in 2016 and eventually became so popular the free game got 1.5 million downloads. When it was finally finished, Pokemon Uranium not only had everything you'd expect from a Pokemon game, from online functionality like trading and battling to an epic story of leaving home and saving the world from a Legendary Pokemon corrupted by Evil, but it also had new features that no true Pokemon game ever had, like the option to play as a non-binary character. It was a fan-made game made in RPG Maker by a group of dedicated Pokemon fanatics over a development cycle of nine years. The funny thing is, it wasn't even a real Pokemon game. Pokemon Uranium was one of the best Pokemon games of all time.