pokemon-claude-red

The prompt

The whole project started from one message typed into Claude Code:

using only pixels directly remake a beautiful pokemon red remake but with better graphics, environments and vfx. visualise everything perfectly as pixel art using raw pixels. absolute pixel art perfection. keep the story exactly as pokemon red (research on web for all dialogue etc)

Everything in this repository grew from that sentence, followed by a few days of playing it and asking for fixes.

Screenshots

Screenshots are rendered by the game itself and live on the media branch, so main stays 100% code.

Play

Play it in your browser at claudered.dev, on a computer or a phone.

To run it yourself, there's no install and no build step. Clone the repo and open index.html in a browser.

git clone https://github.com/levy-street/pokemon-claude-red.git
cd pokemon-claude-red
open index.html            # or double-click it

To run the full site (email sign-up, accounts with cloud saves, the hit counter), serve it with the bundled server. It needs only Python 3:

node tools/build_dist.js      # bundles index.html + src/ into dist/
python3 tools/serve.py        # http://localhost:8784

Controls

On a computer, the mouse also works: click to walk or pick menu entries, right-click for B or the START menu, and scroll lists with the wheel. Progress saves to the browser. An optional free account keeps a copy on the server, so the game survives in-app browsers that wipe storage and can move between devices.

What's in it

• The complete Kanto story: all 224 maps, every trainer, the eight gyms, Team Rocket, Silph Co., the Elite Four, the Champion and Cerulean Cave, with Red's event order and gating. All ~2,500 lines of dialogue follow the original beat for beat, rewritten in new words.
• Every pixel is code.
  • The game draws into a 320×180 framebuffer (Uint32Array), then scales it up with crisp nearest-neighbour pixels.
  • Each map cell has a semantic label ("tall grass", "roof", "bookshelf"), and a procedural painter draws it with shading and texture.
  • Buildings are painted as whole objects with roofs, windows, doors and shadows.
  • There's a day/night cycle with lit windows, fireflies and flickering torches.
  • Every one of the 165 moves has its own animation.
• 151 Pokémon from shapes. A small drawing language (ellipses, polygons, spots, stripes, eyes) is rasterised into outlined, shaded pixel art, and back sprites and party icons are derived from the same description.
• The original music, re-voiced. The note data of all 52 songs is converted from the disassembly. A sequencer that keeps the Game Boy's exact frame timing plays it through new Web Audio instruments: chorused pulse leads, a wave bass with a sub layer, and noise drums with body.
• A character customiser: hair, hats, skin, clothes and bag colours, carried through every sprite and portrait.
• Social Zone, entered through any Pokémon Center's Cable Club:
  • a live lounge: everyone online walks around the same room, with name tags, chat bubbles and a list of who's in;
  • real-time link battles and trades: talk to anyone to challenge them, or join the random-match queue;
  • a level-50 Battle Tower;
  • battles and trades with friends through shareable links, and a two-player versus mode on one screen.
• Who's That Pokémon? A daily and endless silhouette quiz.
• Share cards: every badge, capture, evolution and Hall of Fame entry can become a pixel-art card or a link.
• Classic glitches, recreated from how the original code works:
  • MissingNo. with its +128 item quantity and Hall of Fame corruption;
  • the Mew trick.
• Easter eggs: the world has opinions about AI. Talk to everyone.

Link battles

A live link battle runs in both players' browsers at once. Each game shows its own team at the bottom and sends only its picks (a move, a switch, a replacement) through the server. Both games roll from the same random seed, so they work out identical turns. Each turn the host also sends a checksum and a snapshot of the battle, and if the other game ever drifts it takes the host's numbers. node tools/pvpfuzz.js battles two copies of the game against each other to check they stay in step.

MissingNo.

The old man's catching demo in Viridian City backs your name up into the memory that holds the area's wild Pokémon list. Only maps that have grass encounters overwrite that list. The shore squares just east of Cinnabar Island take their encounter rate from the water, but their Pokémon list from that leftover memory.

1. Watch the old man's demo.
2. Fly to Cinnabar without walking through any grass or caves.
3. Surf up and down the east coast.

The letters of your name, read as level/species bytes, decide what appears: MISSINGNO., 'M, and sometimes a Lv 132 Mewtwo. Meeting MissingNo. adds 128 to the sixth item in your bag.

The Mew trick

1. Press START mid-step as a far-off trainer spots you, then Fly away. That route's script is left waiting to start the battle, and START won't open until you finish a trainer battle.
2. The next battle overwrites the trainer bytes that script will read. Let the Route 25 Youngster's Slowpoke be that battle: its Special stat is 21, which is Mew's internal ID.
3. Walk back onto the route. The START menu opens by itself; close it and a wild Lv 7 Mew appears.

How it's built

index.html          the page: canvas, phone controller, account box, script list
src/core/           framebuffer + drawing primitives, pixel font, input, main loop, audio synth + GB sequencer
src/art/            procedural renderers: terrain, buildings, interiors, characters, Pokémon, battle scenes, VFX
src/data/           maps, species, moves, trainers, music (converted from pokered), dialogue, Pokémon shape files
src/game/           overworld, battles, menus, PC, bag, Pokédex, Social Zone, sharing, cloud saves, glitches
src/scripts/        the story, map by map, following Red's event scripts
tools/              data converters, headless runner, fuzzers, map/sprite/VFX sheet renderers, the site server
docs/               how maps, sprites, dialogue and story scripts are authored

It's plain JavaScript loaded with classic <script> tags. There are no frameworks and no bundler, and it runs from file://.

Rebuilding the data

Map layouts, collision, warps, trainers, wild encounters, species, moves and the music's note data are converted from the [pret/pokered](h