Broken Bootlegs is a weekly series covering unlicensed games (also known as bootleg games) for mainly 8-bit and 16-bit consoles. This week’s edition covers an entry that some people may not be familiar with, but people are quite familiar with in regard to the source material: Pocket Monster!

Several years back while scouring eBay for reasonable-priced bootlegs or prototype games, I happened upon a YH-4126 4 in 1 cart Super Game, advertised with Pokemon Yellow, Blue, Silver, and Red. For $25, I thought I’d try my luck and see if I could get my hands on either infamous Pokemon Red or Pokemon Gold games. After waiting about a week, it finally arrived and was really excited to try it out to see if it would even work. Much to my dismay, it didn’t work in my NES with the pin converter, but I got lucky as it somewhat worked in my Famicom. After turning it on, I tried a few of the games only to see that they’re small sprite hacks of games like Little Nemo and Wacky Races. One game stood out though, as when selecting Pokemon Yellow, it went to a game called Pocket Monster.Read More