As Nintendo maintains radio silence on whether it will ever add early Pokemon games to its NSO library, right now one of the only ways to play them is if you have an original cartridge. Good news if you don't, sightings of bizarre vending machines packed with them have been popping up in California. Hold off on booking a road trip to go find one for now, as it seems very unlikely the games inside are the real deal.
Weeats happened upon one of these vending machines and shared their discovery on ResetEra. “I was strolling through a particularly sad mall in SoCal, when I chanced upon a couple of wack-ass vending machines,” they write. “These machines only sold GB and GBA Pokemon carts at $16 a pop (or $15 if you’re paying cash!).” The attached image shows a vending machine stocked up with copies of Pokemon Red, Yellow, and various other early games in the series. Plus, almost every copy comes with a free Jolly Rancher.
As highlighted by GamesRadar, if the price and the complimentary candy doesn't set off your bootleg radar, then one of the games calling the vending machine home definitely should. There are copies of Pokemon Green in there, a title that was never translated into English nor was it released in the West. It's very unlikely Nintendo and Game Freak have decided to debut Green via vending machines 25 years later.
Turns out these vending machines have been around for a few months, and while they only seem to be in Californian malls, the machine Weeats found isn't the only one. The location of at least one other has been shared on Reddit, and someone on TikTok even decided to put their money where their mouth is and fork out $15 for a copy of FireRed. The caption on that video appears to confirm the games are indeed bootleg and don't actually work, so function as little more than trinkets or perhaps a keyring if you want to put the work in.
I've not even gotten to the most surprising part of this strange story. The vending machines clearly aren't owned by Nintendo or Pokemon, and whoever's running this operation has their email address printed right there on the machines. Not only does that mean angry Pokemon fans who thought they were buying a real game have someone to virtually yell at, but when Nintendo gets wind of this they know exactly who to go after.