If Game Freak has shown one thing over the years, it’s that they’ve never felt comfortable programming 3D videogames. While other Nintendo franchises made the move to the 3D world when technology allowed, the main saga of Pokémon remained in two dimensions. Even in the most recent remake of Pokémon, Bright diamond Y Shimmering Pearl, developed by ILCA, does not respond to the definition of 3D, remaining in what in the world of video games we consider “2.5D”. And this is when CodyCantEatThis comes in, a video game creator who has decided to provide three-dimensionality to the original pokemon video games.
Kanto in 3D keeping the aesthetics of 1996
The original titles of Pokémon Red Y Pokémon Blue They were already a challenge for their developers, who squeezed the capabilities of the Game Boy to the limit. The aerial perspective and in general, the visual section The video game set the bar very high if we compare this pair of 90s games with the titles that shared the shelves with Charizard and Blastoise in stores.
Throwing a little nostalgia, CodyCantEatThis has decided to imagine on his YouTube channel what Red and Blue would have looked like if they had been released in 3D. And yes, we already know that this map already exists in Pokémon Let’s Go. But his intention was not to make a remake, but keep the graphics of the original Pokémon recreating the video game with Unity. And it’s not the first time he’s done something like this. The developer has few videos on his channel, but he did the same with other games from his childhood like Zelda or Super Mario.
The process that followed can be seen in great detail in the video that he has published, which in turn is a capture of his Twitch streaming, since it is recorded live while he makes his creations and he is reading and being inspired by the proposals that make him his followers. First it was done with a complete map of Kanto and then he took each element of the game (houses, trees, fences, mountains) and he was modeling them in 3D taking the plane in two dimensions and giving volume using the extrusion technique. The result is a most peculiar design: a world in black and white that reminds a bit of Minecraft, but that perfectly recreates the visual map of Kanto that we children made in our heads when we played Pokémon.
A complicated development that will hardly see the light
But not everything went smoothly. There were some poak trees during development of this experiment. The first arrived at the time of model the pokemon. And it is that Cody realized that it was not going to be anything simple. After turning the coconut thousands of times, he decided to keep the original flat designs, but with the possibility of them being rotated relative to the camera. An idea that he took from the fantastic saga Paper mario.
The interiors also resisted him. Modeling every home, gym, and cave was going to be an ordeal, so he took a few shortcuts. This time, drawing inspiration from Person 5, the programmer made it possible for the player to interact with gym leaders, nurses and shopkeepers directly from the door of the building, without having to enter the interior.
Unfortunately, the creator does not want to have problems with The Pokémon Company and he has advanced that he is not going to make the video game public. Despite this, he is willing to finish development if people want to. And we think it will be worth it, because the work you have done is simply spectacular.
