Pokémon Green - Chinese Version

Another game I'm lucky to have the box for! And man, do I have a lot to say about this game. Firstly, the colours on the box are extremely saturated, and the way they've made the "green" token makes it tough to read if it's meant to be the Japanese kanji for Green, or one of the Chinese hanzi for Green at a glance (though I'm pretty sure it's the Japanese kanji). I don't recognize the emblem itself from any Pokémon material, so I wonder if the box designer made it themself (could be wrong though. Interestingly the cartridge itself comes labelless, with a sticker of the label included within the box. Kind of neat, if you wanted to use it as a sticker on a notebook or something instead of on the cartridge. It also has an incredibly hard to see codenumber on the bottom left-hand side, I can make out S and 022, but the two characters inbetween I can't.

The back of the box has a few... oddities, too. There's the artwork of the Gold/Silver/Crystal protagonist Gold/ゴールド, artwork of Pikachu, and two edited screenshots. The first appears to be just outside the Pewter City Gym, with the Pokémon Yellow Pikachu artwork copy and pasted twice onto it. The second is a screenshot of a battle between a Sandshrew and a Meowth, with the same Pikachu artwork edited over the Sandshrew. Another funny detail is the barcode - 719593020097, that's... the barcode for Harvest Moon on the Game Boy Color.

Booting up the cartridge itself doesn't bring us into Pokémon Green, but instead into an options menu with several interesting details! At the top, we've got "LOGROOM@263.NET", then "COLOR 1 IN 1", a set of options and inputs, and "-GZ.GD 2001" at the bottom.

First off "LOGROOM@263.NET", so 263.NET is a Chinese e-mail provider so it's likely the contact e-mail for either the translator of this Green hack, or the contact of the person/group who put this cartridge together. GZ.GD doesn't appear on the Wayback Machine as an archived website from back then, with ".gd" being the country code domain for Grenada, so it could just be initials or codenames for people who worked on the translation or hack, but there's no way to know for certain. At least we have a date, though. The RAM test option doesn't appear to do anything, and to launch the game itself, you need to press Start.

Game Specific Notes

Despite the "Green" name and Venusaur box, this fan-translation is actually built off of Pokémon Blue, the English version. Unfortunately after playing for a while then saving the game, it doesn't appear to hold it's save properly/cannot reload the save. It might be due to age though rather than poor construction, it's tough to say when at the time of writing, this cartridge is old enough in every country in the world.

Much like other Chinese-language fan-translations of the time, you cannot actually enter a name for your trainer or nickname outside of using numerical characters.

Actually, names in this are kind of strange in general. Charmander is named PKMN009, Squirtle is PKMN006, and Bulbasaur is... blank. I assumed that going forward all Pokémon would be named after their Pokédex number, but that's not actually the Dex number for Charmander or Squirtle, and other Pokémon have written out names. Charmander's name remains PKMN009 during the rival battle, so it isn't just for the Starter selection...

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