As a huge fan of the original black-and-white first-gen Pokémon games, I'm one of those oddball gamers who'd much rather relive my childhood on the 3DS Virtual Console with the classics rather than play a brand-new or remade entry in the series.
Sadly, Game Freak has yet to fulfill my wish, but with good reason. In an interview with Game Informer, the studio explained:
Our focus right now, as you can see with Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire being a good example, is with the older titles we like to go back and update them and kind of power them up for the new generation. A lot of the communication features we feel that are obviously core to the Pokémon series, we have to update them. So for example these titles are compatible with Pokémon X and Y, you can battle and trade between the two series of games. So right now it’s just really that the only reason is that our focus is on actually updating the games and doing remakes instead of putting out the old titles.
Game Freak also spoke to the noticeable absence of a Pokémon Grey following the release of Black and White. We also have yet to see a Pokémon Z following the release of X and Y. Here's what the studio's Junichi Masuda had to say:
For the Pokémon brand, and for Game Freak, our first and foremost goal and top priority with these titles is to always surprise and excite our fans. I’m not going to say we won’t ever do those things again, but we consider the timing and what would be the most surprising or exciting for fans at the time. Everyone was really expecting Grey, so it was exciting to come up with something fans really didn’t expect.
Would you like to see the older Pokémon games eventually make their way to Nintendo's Virtual Console? How about third releases, like the hypothetical Grey and Z versions that have yet to materialize?
