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Pokémon Red and Blue in 3D and First Person: What Gen1Recomp Actually Is

2026-08-05 · News and analysis

Affiliate disclosure: This guide contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. Learn more.

If you have been anywhere near gaming social media this week, you have probably seen it. Someone walking through Pallet Town in first person. Someone else standing in the middle of Route 1 in a VR headset, checking a Pokédex floating above their left hand. The clips are racking up hundreds of thousands of views, and the comments are full of people asking the same question.

Is this a new Pokémon game?

No. And the real answer is more interesting than a remake would have been.

What You Are Actually Looking At

There are two separate projects stacked on top of each other, and most of the coverage has been mashing them into one thing.

The bottom layer is Gen1Recomp, by a developer going by bryanthaboi. It is a native recreation of Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow, written by hand in Lua and running on the LÖVE 11.x framework. It is not an emulator. There is no Game Boy being simulated anywhere in it.

The top layer is DramaticShapeVoxelMod, by a developer called DramaticShape. That is the part doing the 3D. It takes the flat Kanto overworld and rebuilds it as a voxel diorama, then lets you move the camera around inside it.

The first person mode everyone is sharing is a feature of the mod, not the base project. You need both.

It Is Not an Emulator, and It Is Not a Remake Either

This is the part worth slowing down on, because it is what makes the project unusual.

A normal emulator pretends to be Game Boy hardware. It reads the original code and executes it instruction by instruction on a fake CPU. Gen1Recomp does not do that. Someone sat down and rewrote the game logic in Lua, working from pret's pokered disassembly as a reference, so the battle formulas, the collision, the NPC movement and the encounter rates all behave the way the cartridge does.

The result is a native application. It launches like any other program, and it does not carry the overhead of simulating a 1989 handheld.

But it is also not a remake. This is the second thing people get wrong. Underneath the voxel presentation, nothing about the game design changed. You are walking the same tiles, entering the same doors, triggering the same events, fighting with the same numbers. Nobody redesigned Kanto. They tilted the camera up and gave the flat tiles some height.

That is why it looks so strange and so familiar at the same time.

Where the Game Data Comes From

Gen1Recomp ships with no Pokémon in it.

No sprites, no music, no maps, no text. The repository contains an engine and nothing else. On first launch it asks you for a copy of Red, Blue or Yellow, checks that it is a genuine US cartridge dump, pulls the game data out of it, and then releases the file from memory. The audio is synthesised from channel programs extracted the same way.

So this is a "cartridge you already own" project in the most literal sense. Without your own dump, the app opens and does nothing. Our ROMs and legality explainer covers where the lines sit on that, and the answer we will always give is the same one: dump the cartridge you own.

The Perspective Modes, in Order

The Dramatic Shape mod has been moving fast. Here is roughly how the 3D features arrived, because the ordering explains why the first person clips only started spreading this week.

The voxel overworld came first. Towns, routes and interiors got turned into little tabletop scenes with real depth. You could cycle the camera pitch from a gentle raised angle up to a steep diorama view, and the mod added shadows, water reflections, a day and night cycle, optional world curvature and the ability to stage battles directly on the map instead of on a separate screen.

Then, on August 2, 2026, version 1.5.1 added an experimental first person mode. Mouse, controller and touch all work for looking around. That is the version behind most of the viral clips.

Later the same day, 1.5.2 added PC VR through OpenXR. You move with the left stick, look with your head, and open menus through a Pokédex rendered on your left hand.

On August 3, version 1.5.5 added a third person camera and adjustable battle angles.

All of it is still labelled experimental, and it looks it. First person Kanto is a genuinely odd experience, because the world was designed to be read from above. Doorways and route edges make a different kind of sense at eye level. That is part of the appeal, but do not go in expecting a polished 3D game.

Can Your Handheld Run It?

Yes, and this is the part that should interest you most if you are here.

Gen1Recomp has builds for Windows, macOS, Linux and Android, plus an iOS sideload, a Switch homebrew build, and an official target for one specific retro handheld: the Anbernic RG34XX SP. Not a community port. An actual documented build in the project repository.

It also has a performance tier system that scales the presentation to the hardware without touching the game logic, which is why a $70 clamshell can run it correctly even though it will never run the voxel mod comfortably.

The full breakdown of what works on which device, including the parts that quietly do not work, is in our Gen1Recomp handheld setup guide.

The short version: the base game runs almost anywhere. The 3D and first person modes want real GPU headroom, so that is a Steam Deck OLED or a strong Android handheld like the Retroid Pocket 6 job.

Why This Keeps Happening

Gen1Recomp is not a one off. It is the latest entry in a wave that has been building for about three years.

The pattern is always the same. A community spends years producing a byte accurate disassembly or decompilation of a game. Once that exists, the game stops being locked to its original hardware, and people start building native versions that run anywhere and accept mods that would have been impossible before.

That is how we got Zelda 64: Recompiled and Ship of Harkinian, and it is how the Xbox 360 scene got moving. We covered the whole mechanism in decompilation and recompilation explained, and if you want to see the scope of it, the N64 recompiled games list and the Xbox 360 recompiled games list track what has actually shipped.

Gen1Recomp is a slightly different animal, since it is hand written Lua rather than an automated recompilation. But it lands in the same place. Once the game exists as readable code, a first person camera stops being a fantasy and becomes a weekend project.

The Nintendo Question

We would be dodging if we did not address this.

Nintendo has a long record of removing fan projects, and Pokémon is about as sensitive as its catalogue gets. As of August 5, 2026, no takedown has been issued against Gen1Recomp.

The project's design is clearly built with that in mind. It redistributes no Nintendo assets, contains no ROM data, does not ship a disassembly, and does not emulate the hardware. It is an empty shell until you feed it your own cartridge dump. That is a meaningfully different position from a project that hands you a playable game.

Whether that holds is not something we are going to predict. We are just telling you where things stand.

If you go looking for the project, get it from its own GitHub releases page and nowhere else. Fake emulator and homebrew repositories have been a recurring problem this year, and our guide on downloading emulators safely covers what to check before you install anything.

What It Means for You

If you own a handheld and a copy of Red, Blue or Yellow, this is one of the more interesting things you can do with them right now. Not because the 3D is impressive on a technical level, but because it is a strange and genuinely new way to look at a game most of us have known for thirty years.

Just go in with the right expectations. The base game is stable and faithful. The perspective modes are experimental, they are moving weekly, and they need more hardware than the game itself ever did.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Gen1Recomp an emulator?

No. It is a native recreation written by hand in Lua on the LÖVE 11.x framework. It does not simulate Game Boy hardware, transpile the original assembly, or run a disassembly. The game logic was rewritten to match the original behaviour.

Do I need a ROM to play Gen1Recomp?

Yes. The project ships no game data at all. On first launch it asks for a US copy of Red, Blue or Yellow, verifies it, extracts the data and then releases the file. Without your own cartridge dump the app does nothing.

Is Gen1Recomp legal?

The engine itself contains no Nintendo assets, which is a deliberate design choice. The legality of your game file depends on how you got it, and the only position we endorse is dumping a cartridge you own. No takedown has been issued against the project as of August 2026.

Can you really play Pokémon Red in VR?

Yes, on PC. The Dramatic Shape voxel mod added PC VR support through OpenXR in version 1.5.2 on August 2, 2026. You move with the left stick, look with the headset, and access menus through a Pokédex on your left hand. It is experimental.

Is the first person mode part of Gen1Recomp?

No. First person, third person and VR all come from DramaticShapeVoxelMod, a separate mod that runs on top of Gen1Recomp. You need the base project installed and working first.

Does the 3D mod change the game?

No. The maps, tiles, events, encounter rates and battle formulas are unchanged. The mod only changes how the world is drawn and where the camera sits. You are playing the same game from a different angle.