Pokémon Uranium (2016) - MobyGames (2024)

This Pokémon fangame follows the basic format of official RPGs from the famous franchise, following a young Pokémon trainer as they journey through the fanmade region of Tandor, which is home primarily to original species created by the game's developers; few canon Pokémon make an appearance.

Ten years prior to the game's events, the region suffered a nuclear crisis that resulted in the disappearance of the player character's mother. Wild Pokémon living in the irradiated areas have mutated and become aggressive, gaining the powerful but unstable Nuclear type. Though these Pokémon can be captured just like any other, they are indiscriminately violent and have been known to attack their own trainers. And on top of all of that, a mysterious enemy seems to be deliberately sabotaging the region's remaining nuclear power plants. The player character and their childhood friend, Theo, will have to confront all of these threats, as well as Tandor's eight Gyms and the Pokémon Championship.

Online features allow players to battle and trade with friends, as well as receive Mystery Gifts from the development team.

Development

The game was in development for over nine years. Earlier versions were not an original game at all, but rather a heavily modified ROM of Pokémon FireRed or LeafGreen.

Takedown

A week after the release of the full version of the game, Uranium Team announced that they had received several takedown notices from lawyers representing Nintendo of America. They thus stopped offering official download links, but noted that since the game had already had over 1.5 million downloads, there was nothing stopping anyone from distributing their personal copies of the game files. They still had plans to release patches and add-on content for people who had installed the game.

Development Team Changes

With the blessing of the developers, fans began making unofficial patches in August 2016 to fix glitches and implement dummied-out content. On September 21st of that year, following a brief period of silence on social media, the original developers announced that they were done supporting the game. They then allowed a number of the fans who had worked on the unofficial patches to take over as Uranium Team's new management, retroactively making those patches official.

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