Pokémon Red & Blue Returns As a 3D Game 30 Years Later

Pokémon Red and Blue are some of the most important video games ever made. Now, 30 years after their initial release, the original Pokémon games are back with a new 3D fan remake that's completely free to play.

Over the years, Pokémon Red and Blue have received official. remakes. These include Pokémon Fire Red and Leaf Green in the 2000s, and the spiritual remakes as Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee!, but now the original games have been properly brought into the third dimension.

Pokémon Red and Blue 3D Remakes Are Available to Play For Free Today

Ever since the release of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, a subset of fans have been wanting GameFreak to revisit Kanto yet again so that it can be properly explored as an open-world. Sadly, while Nintendo is currently remaking one of their most iconic games ever in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, GameFreak has made no such announcements about Red and Blue.

Thankfully, fans, and specifically the modding community, have stepped in to soften the wound a little with something fresh and interesting. Available now on GitHub is a mod that will turn Pokémon Red and Blue into a 3D pixel art game.

This gorgeous mod features a 60 frames-per-second frame rate, widescreen support, ambient occlusion, dynamic shadows, and multiple camera angles. The map players travel across is fully 3D, and battles take place in 2.5D.

The mod, "Dramatic Shape Voxel Mod," also allows players to toggle on a rolling world curvature, a la Animal Crossing, and to play in either full color, or in classic Game Boy green monochrome.

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"A mod for the Pokémon Gen 1 Recompilation Project," the official description for the mod beings, "Dramatic Shape Voxel Mod" being part of a much larger experience. "The overworld as a 3D diorama. Terrain is extruded into real geometry, occlusion comes from a depth buffer rather than a y-sort, characters stand as leaning sprite slabs, a shadow map throws real cast shadows across whatever they land on, and an optional tilt-shift pass sells the miniature-model look."

"And battles fought on that world rather than on a white field," the description continues. "When something picks a fight the map's NPCs are culled, the engine's own wipe plays over the empty map, and the battle draws over the nearest patch of clear ground — shot over the shoulder, the player's mon low and left and the enemy high and right, with a slow parallax drift behind them and a depth-of-field pass that keeps both of them sharp."

The 3D remake of Pokémon Red and Blue, 'Dramatic Shape Voxel Mod" is available to play now.

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