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"Lightning" is a graphics and mapping dev for Pokémon Prism, a Crystal ROM hack set in a new region. "I've also loved working with my two buddies MrDollSteak and Ridaz who have helped with the hack and been sounding boards for my ideas for, like, half a decade at this point."īut of course, Gaia isn’t the only Pokémon ROM hack out there. "Tell your readers to check out Revolocities and French-Cyndaquil, super talented guys," they say. It can, they say, be tough to keep working on it as a solo effort, but Ice has been lucky enough to have talented artists approaching them to help with the game. Ice says the collaborative aspect is a really important part for them. "There's something weirdly satisfying about seeing five years of your work get zoomed through in an afternoon." "After the release of v3, my favourite memory has to be watching Werster's speedruns of Gaia," Ice tells me. Gaia has even fostered its own speedrunning scene. "I've tried to give back as I've developed my own abilities by making Gaia open-source," they explain, adding that the players are "all lovely" and that they've often sent kind messages over the years.
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It's a testament to how much the community became involved, and Ice says that the scene has a history of keeping developments free and open-source.
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It was the first ROM hack to incorporate Mega Evolutions from newer Pokémon games, for one thing - though Ice notes that the code for this was written almost entirely by someone else who wanted to help with the project.
Gaia then became something special in the community. "Pretty quickly, though, I realised that I wanted the game to focus on Regigigas, and that quickly led me down a rabbit-hole of adding the data for newer Pokémon, moves, abilities, and so on."
"I started the same way I had started all my previous projects, which was just by making my own towns and routes and populating them with NPCs and events," Ice explains. Ice’s original goal was to make something that was on par with the then-exemplary (and still very popular) Liquid Ocean hack, that “could pass as a convincing, official game.” The challenge came from a desire to port post-Fire Red features into an older game. But Ice was one of a select few who had designed a hack that had actually got as far as the Elite Four, so they had an extra motivation to push onward and actually finish Gaia. As hardly any of the projects were actually finished, people became frustrated. By 2014 they had already started and abandoned at least three or four projects, which was a phenomenon occurring across the community at large. "For Gaia specifically, my main driving force was just wanting to release a finished ROM hack," Ice explains. "At the time I wasn't really aware of what ROM hacking was, but I had always wanted to make my own Pokémon region." Over a decade has passed since then, and Ice is still designing Pokémon ROM hacks for the non-Nintendo world to enjoy. "This was back in 2007, so I was probably violating COPPA rules because I was only like, nine or 10," they add. Ice first got into ROM hacking after discovering the aforementioned PokéCommunity forums, which they originally joined to share their pixel art sprites, including splices of different Pokémon or fake Pokémon they had designed. There are dozens of them, and among the most prominent is Pokémon Gaia, by "Spherical Ice". In fact, a lot of the most popular Pokémon ROM hacks are based on code from Pokémon Crystal.
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The creators of some of the most popular ones agreed to have a chat, and share some of the passion, problems and community spirit to be found behind the scenes of making pocket monsters work on personal computers.įor years Pokéficionados have taken to the PokéCommunity forums and designed their own ROM hacks, mods which often eventuate in complete overhauls of games from decades ago. They’re ROM hacks, and they're sort of like the Yu-Gi-Oh cards you might have brought home after being on holiday when you were younger: just as good as the official ones but, you know… not necessarily official.
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See, PC players are used to having to make do and mend, so there are in fact already Pokémon games that you can play on your computer. Temtem, an MMO game openly - almost brazenly - inspired by Pokémon is out later this month, but you don't have to wait until the 21st of January to play a Pokalike. Although Switch owners got not just one, but a pair of new Pokémon games this year, folks who are committed to PC gaming got the short end of the Farfetch’d leek.