Pokémon Ash Gray: Reliving the Anime’s First Season on GBA

If you were a kid in the late 90s, there’s a good chance your first real exposure to Pokémon wasn’t a Game Boy cartridge — it was the anime. Ash Ketchum, Pikachu, a starting town called Pallet, a rival with spiky hair who was insufferable in exactly the right way. Pokémon Ash Gray is built entirely around that memory, and it’s one of the most beloved fan projects in the entire ROM hacking scene for exactly that reason.

The Pitch: What If the Games Followed the Anime Instead?

Created by a fan developer known as Metapod23, Ash Gray takes the Pokémon Red/Blue engine and rewrites the entire adventure to follow the anime’s first season beat for beat. You don’t choose your starter — you get Pikachu, exactly like Ash did, complete with the early-game friction of a Pokémon that refuses to listen to you. Gym battles play out with the same twists as their animated counterparts. Rival battles, cameo characters, and side events from the show all show up, translated into turn-based RPG form.

It sounds like a novelty on paper, but the execution is what earned this hack its reputation: new tiles, new sprites, custom maps, and hundreds of scripted events that didn’t exist in the original games at all.

A Second Playthrough That Doesn’t Feel Like a Retread

What surprised us most is how different the pacing feels from the original Red/Blue, despite reusing the same core region. Because the plot follows Ash’s specific journey, certain Pokémon show up earlier or later than you’d expect, side characters get actual screen time, and moments that were throwaway lines in the games (like televised battles happening in the background) become scripted set pieces you can actually watch play out.

For anyone who has replayed Red and Blue enough times to have the map memorized, Ash Gray is close to a genuinely new experience wearing familiar clothes.

Getting a Physical Copy

We picked ours up from TheLostGames, a shop that specializes in turning ROM hacks and fan translations like this one into full physical releases — custom box, cartridge, printed insert, plastic sleeve and cartridge protector, shipped worldwide. It’s the kind of presentation that makes a fan game feel like an actual retail release instead of something you’d only ever see on an emulator screen.

If Ash Gray sounds like your kind of nostalgia trip, you can find it directly on their product page, and their wider Game Boy Advance catalog has plenty of other Pokémon ROM hacks worth a look if this one hooks you.