This amazing Pokémon Red and Blue voxel mod adds a 3D perspective without an emulator
Summary
- DramaticShapeVoxelMod turns Pokémon Red/Blue into a voxel 3D remake while keeping the classic look and feel.
- It’s based on Gen1Recomp, which rebuilds game data from your ROM without emulating the Game Boy or including the ROM.
- Gen1Recomp also has optional fixes for Gen 1’s bugs, including the 1/256 miss bug and Focus Energy actually reducing crit chance.
If you’re planning to visit (or re-visit) the game that started one of the biggest media trends in the world, why not do it with style? Someone has released a mod that turns Pokémon Red and Blue into a 3D voxel game while still staying true to the look and feel of the original. The coolest part is that it doesn’t emulate the Game Boy at all; all you need is a ROM of the game.
Gen1Recomp breathes new life into the 90s phenomenon
And it doesn’t emulate a thing
As spotted by our sister website Polygon, DramaticShapeVoxelMod adds voxel graphics to the classic Game Boy title. You can see how it plays in the video above; the world is given a fresh 3D redo, while battle scenes feel a lot more cinematic than two sprites duelling on a blank background in the original game.
While that’s cool in itself, it’s also worth taking a look at the engine that DramaticShapeVoxelMod relies on: Gen1Recomp. This engine contains some custom rulesets you can enable that fix some of the more annoying bugs. For example, “oneIn256Miss” fixes the 1/256 chance that a move with a 100% accuracy rating will miss, while “focusEnergyBug” makes the move Focus Energy actually quadruple your critical hit chance, instead of using the bugged code that divides it by four. Yeah, Pokémon Red and Blue had some really wild bugs.
But here’s the really wild thing: Gen1Recomp doesn’t emulate the Game Boy at all. Instead, it grabs data from the ROM and rebuilds it in its own software:
This project does not include a ROM, emulate the Game Boy, transpile assembly, or download a disassembly. A canonical US Poke Red or Blue ROM is the only game content input.
The ROM is verified, used during import, and then released from memory. It is not copied into the cache. Later launches load the private generated cache and do not ask for the ROM again. Red and Blue can both be imported and played side by side.
If you want to give it a try, be sure to pay the Gen1Recomp GitHub page a visit, then grab DramaticShapeVoxelMod and load it up in Gen1Recomp’s mod menu.
