Pokemon Red & Blue player makes bizarre discovery 25 years after release
The Pokemon CompanyA Pokemon Red and Blue player has discovered that trainers can get a free gift from Professor Oak if they fulfill an oddly-specific set of actions in the game.
The iconic Pokemon franchise began life in Japan in 1996 as Blue and Green, before later reaching the US in 1998 as Red and Blue. They were runaway successes, of course, and players regularly revisit the Game Boy titles for nostalgia and quality gameplay.
25 years later, the OG series of games keep on giving, as trainers often find easter eggs that surprise even the most dedicated of fans.
Most recently, it was discovered that players can get a free gift from Professor Oak that no one seems to know about.
The Pokemon CompanyReddit user ArkthePieKing shared their discovery on the Pokemon subreddit, where they detailed the long and very specific actions the player must take in order to trigger the event with Professor Oak at the start of Pokemon Blue and Red.
They explained that players must have beaten their rival next to Viridian City, have not received the Boulder Badge from Gym Leader Brock, and have not obtained any PokeBalls at all – whether bought or found on the ground – to unlock the event.
Players then need to return all the way to Pallet Town and speak to Professor Oak, despite there being no reason to do. He will offer up free Pokeballs, alongside the dialogue: “You can’t get detailed info on Pokemon by just seeing them. Use these to capture wild Pokemon.”
Considering this requires players to have spent a fair amount of time in the game without ever catching a Pokemon or even owning a PokeBall, ArkthePieKing added: “It’s wild that this event is even in the game given how obtuse and difficult it is to trigger!”
And it seems that no one else knew about this little side-mission either, with Reddit users debating among themselves why exactly this was added into the game in the first place.
“Unbelievable. Old games are hilarious for their strange decisions,” wrote one fan, while another added: “The magic of old games, filling their story with secret little nuggets that you can only find if you do what is least logical.”
Some suggested the gift may have existed as a “final failsafe” to help players who really struggled with progressing in the game, while others speculated that Oak was originally going to visit you after the rival battle to give you the Pokeballs but that ended up being scrapped.
While it’s certainly not a groundbreaking discovery, it is interesting to see that players who have complete the game over and over again still never managed to stumble upon this little event.
That’s not the only revelation that’s been made by fans of the original Pokemon games lately: An electrifying easter egg in Pokemon Yellow featuring the franchise’s mascot Pikachu left fans stunned last year.