The title card from the Pokémon Claude Red build video. Pokémon © Nintendo / Creatures / Game Freak. Image: Pokémon Claude Red build video (YouTube)
A developer has used Claude Opus 5.5 to remake the whole of Pokémon Red as a free browser game, with every sprite, building and battle effect drawn by code rather than image files. Pokémon Claude Red was shared on Reddit’s r/ClaudeAI by the user singing_coach_ai on Sunday, where it has more than 800 upvotes, and its code is on GitHub.
One prompt, four days #
According to the project’s GitHub page, it started from a single 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 The opening prompt, from the Pokémon Claude Red GitHub page
Claude built it between September 24 and 27, “directed by” Levy Street, the credits say. On Reddit, singing_coach_ai said Claude wrote about 25,000 lines of JavaScript over about three days, and that their own job was playing through the game and reporting what broke. They said it was cheap to make and didn’t hit the usage limits on their Max 20x plan. Those figures come only from the Reddit post and haven’t been independently checked.
What’s in it #
The game draws into a tiny 320×180 screen, pixel by pixel. Each of the 151 Pokémon is stored as a list of shapes (ellipses, polygons, spots and stripes) that the game shades and outlines as it runs, and every map tile is painted from a label such as “tall grass” or “roof”. It covers the full story, with all 224 maps, eight gyms, Team Rocket, the Elite Four and the Champion, and the old MissingNo. and Mew glitches are recreated from how the original code worked.
It isn’t built from scratch, though. The map layouts, trainers, wild encounters and the music’s note data are converted from pret/pokered, a fan project that reverse engineered the original game’s code. No graphics or original text were taken from it, the page says, and all the dialogue has been rewritten in new words. The project also uses test bots that talk to every character on every map and fight thousands of random battles.
A video linked in the Reddit post shows how it was built:
“I have no idea why this worked” #
The most common question in the Reddit thread was how singing_coach_ai got Claude to agree. Several users said Claude had refused far smaller requests on copyright grounds: one said it stripped every recognisable Pokémon name and asset out of a homework app they were building for their child, and another said it wouldn’t draw a cartoon DeLorean. singing_coach_ai was as puzzled as anyone:
Honestly I have no idea why this worked, it’s usually denying me on every random thing
singing_coach_ai, who posted the game on Reddit
Anthropic hasn’t commented on the project. Pokémon Red also turned up in Anthropic’s own launch post for Claude Sonnet 5.5 on Monday, which says it’s the first Sonnet model to beat the game working only from screenshots.
Will Nintendo let it stay up? #
Most commenters in the Reddit thread expect a takedown. The game is labelled a free, non-commercial fan project, not affiliated with Nintendo, The Pokémon Company, Game Freak or Anthropic, but that hasn’t saved fan games before: Pokémon Uranium was pulled in 2016 after Nintendo sent takedown notices, and Pokémon Prism was cancelled days before its release that year. Nintendo hasn’t commented. Reviews of the art are mixed, too: some players love it, others call the Pokémon “goofy” or “nightmare fuel”.
Why it matters #
A full remake of a classic game used to take fan teams years. This one took four days and one person, because the model did the drawing, the music and the code. It also shows how inconsistent Claude’s copyright refusals are: the same model that wouldn’t draw one user a cartoon car rebuilt one of Nintendo’s best-known games.
Sources: Pokémon Claude Red on GitHub (primary), claudered.dev, the build video, r/ClaudeAI.