Pokemon’s Greatest Hits are Trapped on Old Consoles, and That Needs to Change

Pokemon is the most profitable franchise in the world, something worth noting as it celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. A series as lucrative and long-running as this naturally knows how to work to fans’ sense of nostalgia. It’s why we’ve gotten so many great remakes of classic Pokemon games, but for a series known for how reverently it treats its own legacy, it’s surprising that Game Freak hasn’t capitalized on the most obvious way to sell nostalgia: porting, not remaking, older Pokemon games.

Remakes are great, but they’re rare and don’t always live up to the memories fans have of the original. Many fans raised an eyebrow when Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire removed Pokemon Emerald‘s Battle Frontier, and people are still wondering why Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl almost completely lacked any content from Platinum. But more than anything, Pokemon needs to re-release its older games because buying them secondhand tends to cost more than the consoles they were originally on.

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Retro Pokemon Games Can Cost a Week’s Worth of Groceries for Some

Generation 5 sure was great. Pokemon Black 2 and White 2 were extremely robust, filled with content that expanded on the originals (with this being the first time that a “third” game was replaced with sequels). They were the first time the main series really put more of a focus on the story over the gameplay, and the animated sprites are still gorgeous to look at. For many fans, the Nintendo DS Pokemon era in general really produced some of the series’ all-time greats. Too bad a copy of Black or White easily goes for upwards of $100 USD online, and that’s without the box or manual.

The sequels, Black 2 and White 2, sell for over twice that on Amazon. In fact, all the mainline titles between Generations 1 and 5 are shockingly expensive now. Meanwhile, the basic Nintendo Switch Online subscription gives players access to over 100 NES and SNES games to play, all for only $15 a year. Over 100 games that, collectively, cost less than 1/15 the price of Pokemon White 2 on Amazon.

There’s clearly a supply and demand issue when it comes to older games, and Nintendo knows very well that retro titles sell. That’s why it has always had a way to pay for retro titles ever since the Wii came out. It’s not like Pokemon hasn’t actually put mainline titles on the Virtual Console before, either: Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold, Silver, and Crystal all came out on the 3DS Virtual Console before it was shut down. But with the 3DS eShop’s closure, players who didn’t buy them in time will have to find a working console and shell out the money for an overly expensive copy of the originals if they want to play any of the pre-Nintendo Switch mainline games.

Last Appearances for Some Classic Pokemon Games

The Nintendo Switch Would Make Retro Ports More Lucrative Than Ever

While Pokemon fans have always argued over whether and when the games got worse, quality debates arguably reached a fever pitch in the Switch era. Sword and Shield’s infamous Pokédex cuts cast a shadow over it that it’s yet to really escape from in the eyes of many older fans. Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl were also met with disappointment by fans because they weren’t really updated to the standards of the games that came after them, and that’s not even getting into how they didn’t include content from Platinum. And the less said about Pokemon Scarlet and Violet’s performance issues, the better. The two Legends titles did do better in winning over the fandom, but that’s still a pretty low batting average for the past 7 years.

That being said, the Switch Pokemon games are hardly hurting financially or critically. The lowest “Top Critic Average” among them on OpenCritic is Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, at 71 out of 100 points. According to Nintendo’s sales data, the Galar and Paldea duos of games have both sold over 25 million copies as of December 2025, well over even system-seller The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The new Pokemon games aren’t bad, and the voices saying otherwise form a vocal minority. But there are strengths in the older titles that the newer ones don’t have, and vice versa.

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Nostalgia Isn’t Inherently Bad

Image via Game Freak

“Back in my day” isn’t a great argument for why something is good, but nostalgia is valid as long as it isn’t blinding. Every Pokemon game has a fanbase, so even if older games haven’t aged as well, there’s still value—both financially and for game preservation—to putting the classics on a modern console with no changes. Pokemon is also big enough that nostalgia is genuinely a strong incentive for fans to buy, even if they acknowledge that their favorite childhood entry might not have been as strong as they remembered.

Maybe Game Freak hasn’t done any ports because it’s afraid that easy access to the original games would hurt the sales potential for remakes down the line. But the gaps between original game releases and their remakes are getting longer and longer, so releasing an occasional port shouldn’t do much to dull the hype since remakes take so long anyway. FireRed and LeafGreen came out just under 8 years after Red and Green did in Japan, HeartGold and SoulSilver were about 9 years after Gold and Silver, Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire were 12 years apart from Ruby and Sapphire, and Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl were an entire 15 years after Diamond and Pearl. Black and White have already passed Sinnoh’s record for longest remake gap, and there’s still no news on that front as of this writing.

Image via Game Freak

Whether it’s due to nostalgia or just to let new fans see what the older games were like, it’s high time that older Pokemon games were re-released as close to their original forms as possible. Remakes can still do their job of bringing the older titles up to date with modern standards, but ports would help quiet the crowd decrying the newer games a bit and help with game preservation in the process. Nostalgia blindness aside, I miss the Nintendo DS and don’t want to sell my kidney to get a copy of Pokemon Platinum.