If you’re feeling nostalgic for the good old days of Pokémon, you need to check out this Pokémon Scarlet demake for the original Game Boy. Pixel artist 2bitcrook has completely reimagined the beginning of Game Freak’s most recent generation in the style of the original Red and Blue games.
As much as I personally love Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, the game’s less-than-perfect graphics and performance certainly caused plenty of discussion among fans. Many people believe that the best Pokémon games are those that make use of intricate pixel art and that the franchise should never have made the jump to 3D. Of course, this could just be the 90s kid nostalgia talking, but there’s clearly still a lot of demand for the style given how many retro handhelds you can buy these days.
2bitcrook has reimagined plenty of 3D or color games like Digimon World, Dark Cloud, and Psychonauts for the original Game Boy’s green and black dot matrix, sharing his impressive pixel sprite and background artwork on his Twitter. Pokémon Scarlet is his most recent project and it’s gained a lot of attention online thanks to his adorable gen 9 Pokémon sprites and ten-minute gameplay showcase on a custom physical cartridge.
Alongside Handheld Gameplayer, 2bitcrook has created custom Game Boy packaging for the Scarlet cartridge to complete the nostalgia trip, as well as two other cartridges mimicking a Japanese version of Scarlet and Violet based on the original Red and Green version artworks. We highly recommend giving his Twitter a browse to see more beautifully detailed screenshots of the game, or you can download the game for yourself for Game Boy or the Analogue Pocket via 2bitcrook’s Patreon.
We love seeing awesome fan projects like this Pokémon Scarlet demake. We don’t know about you, but it makes us want to go and play through every Pokémon game in order all over again. If you prefer checking out what’s new in the franchise, you can read about Pokémon Go’s Sustainability Week event next.