The world of Pokemon is a bright, colorful place full of unusual animals.
And if you're anything like the average gamer, you've spent hundreds of hours wandering through
the wilderness, looking for Pocket Monsters to fight, kidnap, and train to battle for
you.
It's a vicious cycle, and that underlying weirdness has given rise to some of the strangest,
creepiest video game bootlegs and mods of any series out there.
After seeing these Pokemon bootlegs, we're not sure if you'll want to catch 'em all.
Pokemon “Creepy” Black
The bizarre rumor of Pokemon “Creepy” Black first popped up around 2005 when someone
supposedly found an all-black Game Boy cart at a flea market.
The game gives you the option to start out with your standard Pokemon, but you can also
start out with Ghost, a Pokemon that can do only one thing: instantly terrify other Pokemon
and trainers to death.
By the end of the game, your trusty Ghost turns on you, and you too are dragged into
the cold, cold ground.
As with most online horror stories, Pokemon “Creepy” Black probably wasn't a legit
cart, but the weird Internet story inspired multiple modders to bring the game to life
in ROM form.
Download it if you'd like a sleepless night or two, pondering the ethics of being a Pokemon
trainer.
Just watch out for those Ghost-types.
The creepy doesn’t stop there, however...
Hypno's Lullaby
A mod that arose from a creepypasta poem, Hypno's Lullaby is all about the strange,
hypnotic Pokemon and his secret penchant for kidnapping small children and bringing them
to his cave in Berry Forest.
One could argue that every single Pokemon deserves a bit of revenge for how they're
treated by their trainers, and Hypno's Lullaby exacts that revenge tenfold.
Your hero really has no option but to grab a starter Pokemon and wander into the woods,
where you're immediately captured by Hypno and trapped in a cave with other zonked-out
kids.
As you work your way out of the cave, you can only order your Pokemon to kill Hypno's
juvenile slaves, who block every exit.
Then, you work your way through a tower full of unbeatable ghosts and the spirits of children
you've killed.
Eventually, Hypno throws one last barrage of children at you before trapping you in
a room where he eats your dreams for all eternity.
There is no end; you just shut off the game and quietly walk away, telling no one what
you’ve done.
There’s even more for you, however, if you like your Pokemon full of death and despair.
Pokemon Snakewood
Pokemon Ruby is a popular Pokemon game to mod, and Pokemon Snakewood is just one strange
example of the results.
Snakewood crosses Pokemon with The Walking Dead.
The result is a game in a post-apocalyptic setting populated by zombies and demons, where
even the Pokemon have adorably creepy names like Poliwraith and Headoom.
In true Walking Dead style, your hero wakes up in a destroyed town, encounters someone
being attacked by zombies, and finds a safe zone.
As you play, you eventually battle the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which is a lot
scarier than just battling some spoiled kid who likes forcing animals to fight one another.
It's a surprisingly robust story for an unofficial game.
Snakewood proves that Pokemon has its fair share of inventive—and weird—fans.
Pokemon Quartz
Do you love the concept of Pokemon but hate all of those corporate, Nintendo-approved
monsters?
Well, Pokemon Quartz may be the game for you.
Dedicated Pokemon bootleggers made a copy of Ruby and replaced all of the official Pokemon
sprites with their own malformed creations.
While these Pocket Monsters' names and appearances have changed, their powers and stats remain
intact.
Why have the Charmanders been replaced with these?
Our best scientists are still working on an answer.
Quartz is criticized for being relatively amateurish and incomplete, but the visual
overhaul of so many lovable and popular Pokemon is just so weirdly obsessive… and pointless...
that it can't be ignored.
Pokemon Sweet
Modded from FireRed, Pokemon Sweet reimagines the entire world of Pokemon as a surreal,
Candy Kingdom-like place.
Here, everything is made of desserts, and delicious danger lurks around every corner.
Because just walking around cotton candy fields isn't enough, your favorite Pokemon, now called
Pokesweets, are now named after snacks.
Bulbasaur becomes Brownisaur and gets a dollop of whipped cream and a cherry.
And Popsichu... has a giant wooden stick shoved into its head.
Pokemon types are now flavors instead, and you basically just ruined your dinner.
The deadliest attack in the game?
Diabetes.
Moemon Emerald / FireRed
For those who want their Pokemon experience to be even weirder, Moemon is for you.
Moemon replaces all of those totally unattractive monsters with sprites of cosplay girls dressed
up as Pokemon instead, raising even more ethical questions than the original.
Because pitting animals in deathmatches against one another isn't horrifying enough, you now
send costumed girls into the arena to fight one another until one finally passes out from
the pain.
Instead of building your Pokemon collection, you slowly grow a violent, confusing little
harem.
Pokemon AshGray
True Pokenerds know the differences between the original Pokemon games and the anime of
the same name.
AshGray inventively tweaks the original game's script and missions to actually follow the
events of the offshoot media, including many episode-specific events, from giving donuts
to Primeapes to leaving Pikachu to live with other Pikachu in the forest.
The result is a carton of Easter eggs for devotees of the Pokemon universe, who may
have found the original games lacking after seeing the more colorful anime.
If the cartoon isn’t your thing, however, there are even more options for players who
want something more out of Pokemon than just grinding for Gengars.
Pokemon Advanced Adventure
As far as narrative structure goes, the Pokemon anime series is still pretty flimsy.
Ash doesn't have any real motivation to be the best Pokemon trainer in the world, aside
from the fact that it's something to do in a world without standardized education or
non-Pokemon-based employment opportunities.
Pokemon Advanced Adventure flips the script and rewrites Ash as a kid struggling against
poverty, genetically modified Pokemon, and Professor Oak's insane, tyrannical grandson
whose only purpose is to train Pokemon to kill.
Finally, Ash is written as an actual hero, and not just some animal hoarder with dozens
of neglected pets.
Pokemon Vietnamese Crystal
While most of these games are intentionally strange, there are also a few examples that
are amazing by accident, like Pokemon Vietnamese Crystal.
Fake Pokemon carts are a huge business, and Kotaku reports that this was a genuine bootleg
that circulated in Vietnam before it was poorly translated into English.
As a result, the game's text is hilarious: it regularly drops profanity, calls Pokemon
"elves," and barely attempts to make sense.
Since it's just a mistranslated Pokemon game without any big changes, it plays just fine,
if you can make the right text selections through the garbled menus and figure out what
the game means by phrases like "volcano bakemeat"... which kinda sounds exactly like something
Guy Fieri would serve.
2003 Pocket Monster Carbuncle
Unlike most Pokemon bootlegs, which just tweak existing code, 2003 Pocket Monster Carbuncle
actually attempts some originality, according to a GeekParty review.
The resulting game plays a bit like the classic NES Dragon Warrior, but also reduces the number
of Pokemon to 20, tossing biodiversity out the window.
The word "carbuncle" usually refers to a cluster of boils, which would be appropriate enough
for this game, but it's also an obscure word for a red gemstone, which fits in with Pokemon's
recurring theme of naming games after fancy rocks.
Unfortunately, 2003 Pocket Monster Carbuncle is a garbage game, and it doesn't play like
Pokemon in any sense whatsoever, but points for trying something new, unknown foreign
plagiarizers!
Pocket Monsters GO!
GO!
Now, we enter the realm of the truly terrible.
For no reason whatsoever, other than to dupe unsuspecting Pokemon fans, some horrible soul
switched out sprites from The Smurfs' Nightmare for Game Boy Color, made it run at half speed,
and pretended it was a Pokemon game.
Even the most lonely fanfic writers never asked for a Smurfs/Pokemon crossover, but
anything is possible when you have no friends.
Starting off your adventure, you’re greeted by a talking Meowth head who rambles the following:
"Every night in my dreams I see you, I feel you.
You are here so I very fear.
There is some hate that will not go away."
Then, you send your morbidly obese Pikachu through some kind of Satan Town with flickering,
seizure-inducing backgrounds.
You then quickly pull the cart out of your Game Boy and throw it across the room before
it's too late.
Pokemon Stadium: Super Nintendo Edition
Despite Pokemon's relentless popularity, there was never an official game made for the original
Nintendo Entertainment System or the Super Nintendo.
In fact, the first major Pokemon game for consoles was the Nintendo 64's Pokemon Stadium,
so it makes little sense to reverse engineer an N64 cartridge to an older gaming system.
The SNES was pretty outdated by this time, so making bootlegs of imaginary games wasn’t
really economically viable.
It's like trying to sell a fake dial-up modem; even if it’s real, no one needs one anymore.
Much like the real Pokemon Stadium, the SNES bootleg is a turn-based fighter, but with
a limited roster of twelve Pokemon.
They all have incorrect names: Diglett is Dagut, Mewtwo is Mu, and Jigglypuff is Pulin.
It's a fully functional game, unlike most bootlegs, but it's a step in the wrong direction,
just like the final game in our list...
Pokemon 4-in-1
Another relic from the age of the original Nintendo, Pokémon 4-in-1 is one of those
terrible anthology games that crams four games onto a cart to apologize for all of them sucking.
And again, because the Nintendo Entertainment System was becoming a thing of the past by
the time Pokémon was popular, this is just weird.
The game includes Picaclick, where you click on groups of matching symbols; Picadance,
where you tap on Pokéballs in time to a song; Picaslot, which is a slot machine for amateur
gamblers, and…
Pac-Man.
Which is Pac-Man, but with a disembodied Pikachu head.
Every single aspect of this is a waste of money and time, but because it’s bizarre
and obscure, Pokecollectors will sell their Pokekidneys to get their hands on one.
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