Someone recreated Pokémon Red in Minecraft, and it's as awesome as it sounds

There have been some truly awe-inspiring creations to come out of the Minecraft community over the years, but if you're into Pokémon, the latest is a doozy. An enterprising Minecraft tinkerer who goes simply by Mr. Squishy has achieved the gargantuan task of completely recreating Pokémon Red in vanilla Minecraft. Yes, you read that right.

According to PCGamer, Mr. Squishy astonishingly completed the project by himself over a period of 21 months. No mods were used, and it was built using 357,000 command blocks. Better still, Mr. Squishy even managed to work in some of the famous bugs that those of us who grew up on the original games will remember fondly. From Mr. Squishy:

I have done my best to incorporate all of the original game's features, along with a few iconic bugs (most notably MissingNo/'M and item duplication). I chose not to add any sounds to the game, as I fear there would've been too many desynch issues distracting from the game itself.I began working on this project in July of 2015 and worked on it fairly consistently through release. The most common question I'm asked is why I made this project. My answer is simple: I love pushing the boundaries of the game. Minecraft really shouldn't be able to run Pokemon Red - it's a 3D game about building and surviving - but the fact that it can is excites me. It truly shows that if you can dream it, you can make it.

The author warns that you'll want to dedicate 2GB of RAM to run the game and make regular backups. Of course, it goes without saying that there will be bugs to contend with, too. If this sounds like its up your alley, you find the download to get started at the Minecraft forum.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go be the very best, like no one ever was.

Download at the Minecraft forums

Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl

12 Comments
  • Ok, so I don't play Minecraft, but I'm guessing this is playing the 2d game within Minecraft itself like the video shows? Or is it a minecraft-esque representation of the game? If it's the former, how exactly do they achieve that?
  • It's the former like in the video. And your guess is as good as mine; wizardry, I imagine.
  • Wow. I had heard of people creating working "computers" within Minecraft, maybe this is an extension on that, effectively creating the machine to run the game within the game. Even though I don't play it I can't help but say Minecraft is probably one of the greatest wonders in "gaming" that has ever been conceived, the possibilities truly do appear to be endless.
  • There was a video floating around a few months ago about someone that programmed Donkey Kong in Minecraft, but with dramatically different results. In the DK video it was extremely slow. Hours per move slow. He showed us exactly how he did it and it was an extreme amount of work to get it to that point. I am quite curious as to how he created this. The possibilities are endless.
  • The Atari video was emulating the hardware including the television scanline of the game, so I think this Pokemon game is not emulating the original gameboy. It looks like what the creator did was reverse engineer the game and then combine that with an NPC feature he mentions to put the sprites on the screen. I don't play Minecraft, but it is my guess that emulating the gameboy and dot matrix display would get a little slow after seeing how the Atari ran. This is more like a port or reimplementation. Pretty cool.
  • For years, I never understood while glancing over as to why my kids enjoyed Minecraft so much. It wasn't until I sat down and joined them what the big fuss was about. It's simply amazing the creativity of some game mods.
  • i was expecting to see your character be minecraft guy and you wander the minecraft blocks that recreated the pokemon world
  • It was the guy next to me.
  • We'll get to emulate Zelda Breath of the Wild soon 😂
  • not in Minecraft but they already did it in CEMU 1.7.3.
  • The next frontier: emulating a guy playing Pokemon Red inside of Minecraft, inside​ of Minecraft.
  • Another example of why Minecraft is the greatest videogame ever created, and why it will go down in history as Microsoft's greatest acquisition ever.