Weirdest Pokemon Bootlegs

The bizarre rumor of Pokemon Black (not the 2011 Nintendo DS game) popped up around 2005 when someone supposedly found an all-black Game Boy cart at a flea market, according to a story on Tiny Cartridge. The game gave you the option to start out with your standard Pokemon. The big change is that you can start out with Ghost, a Pokemon that can do only one thing: instantly terrify other Pokemon and trainers to death, leaving a trail of gravestones in its wake. Normally, your opponents would just get their Pokemon knocked out and everyone lives to fight another day, but not when Ghost is ripping out their souls. Finally, at the end of the game, your trusty Ghost turns on you, and you too are dragged into the cold, cold ground.

As with most online horror stories/creepypastas, Pokemon Black probably wasn't a legit cart, but the weird Internet story inspired multiple modders to bring the game to life in ROM form. Download it if you'd like a sleepless night or two, pondering the ethics of being a Pokemon trainer. Just watch out for those Ghost-types.

Pokemon Ruby is a popular entry of the series to mod, and Pokemon Snakewood is just one strange example of the results. Snakewood crosses Pokemon with The Walking Dead and presents a game in a post-apocalyptic setting populated by zombies and demons, where even the Pokemon have adorably creepy names like Poliwraith and Headoom.

In true Walking Dead style, your hero wakes up in a destroyed town, encounters a local being attacked by zombies, and finds a safe zone. As you play, you eventually battle the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which is a great indicator of just how far a departure this is from the standard Pokemon fare, where your worst opponent is just some other rich kid who likes forcing animals to fight one another. It's a surprisingly robust story for an unofficial game. Snakewood proves that Pokemon has its fair share of weird—and inventive—fans.

Time for some palate cleansing. Modded from FireRed, Pokemon Sweet reimagines the entire world of Pokemon as a surreal, Candy Kingdom-like place. Here, everything is made of desserts and delicious danger lurks around every corner. Because just walking around cotton candy fields isn't enough, your favorite Pokemon, now called Pokesweets, are now named after snacks. Bulbasaur turns into Brownisaur and gets a dollop of whipped cream and a cherry. Popsichu has a giant wooden stick shoved into its head. Pokemon types are now flavors instead, and you basically just ruined your dinner. The deadliest attack in the game? Diabetes.

True Pokenerds know the differences between the original Pokemon games and the anime/manga of the same name. AshGray inventively tweaks the original game's script and missions to actually follow the events of the offshoot media, including many episode-specific events, from giving donuts to Primeapes to leaving Pikachu to live with other Pikachu in the forest. The result is a bevy of Easter eggs for devotees of the Pokemon universe, who may have found the original games lacking after seeing the more colorful anime.

While most of these games are intentionally strange, there are also a few examples that are amazing by accident, like Pokemon Vietnamese Crystal. Fake Pokemon carts are a huge business, and Kotaku reports that this was a genuine bootleg (made from—you guessed it—Pokemon Crystal) that circulated in Vietnam before it was poorly translated into English. As a result, the game's text is hilarious: it regularly drops F-bombs, calls Pokemon "elves," and barely attempts to make sense.

Since it's just an improperly translated Pokemon game without any big changes, it plays just fine, if you can make the right text selections through the garbled menus and stop laughing about phrases like "volcano bakemeat," which sounds exactly like something Guy Fieri would serve.

Now, we're going into the realm of the truly terrible. For no reason whatsoever, other than to dupe unsuspecting Pokemon fans, some horrible soul switched out sprites from The Smurfs' Nightmare for Game Boy Color, made it run at half speed, and pretended it was a Pokemon game. Even the most lonely fanfic writers never asked for a Smurfs/Pokemon crossover, but anything is possible when you have no friends.

Starting off your adventure, a talking Meowth head tells you, "You are here so I very fear. There is some hate that will not go away." Then, you send your morbidly obese Pikachu through some kind of Satan Town with flickering, seizure-inducing backgrounds. Hopefully, if you're one of the unfortunate owners of this craptastic bootleg, you can quickly pull the cart out of your Game Boy and throw it across the room before it's too late.

Pokemon 4-in-1 is an attempt at being one of those crappy anthology titles that crams four minigames onto a single cart. This calls back to similar cartridges sold for the NES long before Pokemon's popularity began, which makes it weird that Pokemon 4-in-1 was done in such a manner.

There's Picaclick, where you click on groups of matching symbols; Picadance, where you tap on Pokeballs along to a song; Picaslot, which is a slot machine for amateur gamblers; and...Pacman, which is Pac-Man, but starring a disembodied Pikachu head. Every single aspect of this bootleg is a waste of money and time, but since it's bizarre and obscure, collectors would sell one of their kidneys to get their hands on one.