Crazy talented Pokémon fan accomplishes childhood dream, fills us all with childlike wonder.
Playing the original Pokémon Red and Green for the Game Boy was a memorable experience for a lot of gamers, and that’s especially true for Japanese fan and Twitter user @UMA_RABBIT. Even 20 years later, he still remembers the excitement of taking his first steps out of Pallet Town, heading north along Route 1 on his way to becoming a Pokémon Master.
But that’s not all ＠UMA_RABBIT remembers. Route 1 is a mountainous road, but like most RPGs of the era, Pokémon Red and Green (or Pokémon Red and Blue, the versions North America got) uses bit-mapped graphics in a partially angled overhead perspective. While the gameplay mechanics and 2-D art could communicate that ＠UMA_RABBIT was heading higher into the mountains as he travelled Route 1, he couldn’t help wondering what the original Pokémon world would look like in three-dimensional space.
Now, two decades later, he has his answer.
Well, to put it more accurately, he’s made the answer. In June of 2020, ＠UMA_RABBIT started building a hand-crafted paper diorama of Pallet Town and Route 1.
After that, he just kept going, and going…
…until he’d finished the entire Kanto region!
▼ A side-by-side comparison with the illustrated Kanto map
The display looks equally awesome whether you’re taking it all in at once or from Pokémon Trainer’s eye-level, as shown here with the Route 4/Cerulean City/Route 24/Route 25 stretch.
Other sightseeing highlights include Vermillion City, with the S.S. Anne docked in its harbor…
…the dense forests of Route 2…
…and the both literal and figurative end of the road, the stately walls of the Pokémon League building atop the Indigo Plateau.
In total, the diorama is 3.6 meters (11.8 feet) wide by 3.9 meters deep. For scale, here’s someone standing next to the project in a partially assembled state.
Oh, and we still haven’t gotten to two especially cool design details. First, the lights of the big cities can be turned on…
…and second, the whole thing is modular, helping with storage and transportation.
If all this looks like not only an incredible display of Poké-passion, but also an incredible amount of work, you’re right. Even this super high-speed montage of roughly two dozen time-lapse videos isn’t enough to cover the whole planning and production process.
So, now that this 25-month labor of love is over, what’s ＠UMA_RABBIT going to do? He’s going to take a one-month break, and then in August he’ll be starting on a diorama of the Johto region, the map for Pokémon Red and Green’s sequel, Pokémon Gold and Silver.
Truly, a Pokémon Master’s journey is never done.
Source: Twitter/@UMA_RABBIT, IT Media
Top image: Twitter/@UMA_RABBIT
Insert images: Twitter/@UMA_RABBIT (1, 2)
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Follow Casey on Twitter, where he’s happy to be a resident of the real-world Vermillion City.