While the Pokémon games are no strangers to remakes, the original versions of old games have been sadly left trapped on their original systems. Outside of Pokemon Red, Blue and Yellow’s 3DS re-releases, fans of the series have been forced to move onto new games with each console.
So far in the Nintendo Switch generation, Game Freak has released remakes of Pokemon Red and Blue with Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee as well as Sinnoh remakes with Shining Diamond and Brilliant Pearl. The developer is reportedly working on Pokemon Let’s Go Johto games as well.
A post on the Serebii fansite forums saw fans of the series wonder why the series has consistently refused to re-release old games on new platforms. With the Nintendo Switch able to play Game Boy, Game Boy Colour and Game Boy Advance games, games up until Pokemon Emerald could easily be made available on the new console.
“It seems the mainline Pokemon games never get offical re-releases. The one rare time it happened was on the now shut down Virtual Console which only re-relelased the Gen 1 and 2 games, with games from Gen 3 onwards having still never gotten re-released on later hardware,” forum user WaterTypeStarter asked. “With how popular the classic Pokemon games are in the gaming community, why is it that they seem to never be re-released?”
Weirdly, while mainline Pokémon games have been essentially locked to their original systems, multiple spin-off games have been. For example, Pokemon Snap, Pokemon Stadium and Pokemon: The Trading Card Game are available via Nintendo Switch Online, but not a single mainline entry.
There is some reason why the games are harder to re-release than other games: trading. Since the Pokemon Games require trading to complete a Pokedex, they need some form of trading functionality. However, this was already fixed with the 3DS re-releases of Red, Blue and Yellow, letting players send creatures to their Pokemon Bank.
Of course, Pokemon is one of the most pirated game series around with most people playing the older games via emulators. However, most fans would still buy the old games on new systems if Game Freak offered a way to do so. I know I would spend a few dollars on a port of Pokemon Emerald!
The latest entry in the Pokemon series is currently the controversial Scarlet and Violet, and their DLCs on Nintendo Switch.
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