Pokemon Company Denies Claims It Has Problems With ‘Nuzlocke Runs’

The Pokémon Company has denied claims it has a problem with content creators performing “Nuzlocke runs” of its games, amid claims it has previously removed creators from the content program for doing so.

It was recently claimed by Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang, the former co-hosts of the official Nintendo YouTube show Nintendo Minute, that The Pokémon Company strongly opposed their proposal to run a Nuzlocke race.

A Nuzlocke run is a playthrough of the game that can have many rules, but the two most important are a ‘permadeath’ rule (where if a Pokemon faints it must be released) and a rule that players can only catch the first wild Pokemon they meeting in each area, and no other.

However, Ellis and Yang claim they were told such rules were as frowned upon as ROM hacking, which The Pokémon Company has now denied.

In a statement to Serebii site owner Joe Merrick, The Pokémon Company International said: “We have no problem with fans/creators playing the games with Nuzlocke rules.”

As part of a viewer Q&A in a YouTube video posted last week, Ellis and Yang were asked if they had ever tried a Nuzlocke edition of the game.

“We thought this would be a great idea for a Nintendo Minute video,” Ellis said. “So we pitched it to the Pokémon Company and said ‘hey, we’d like to do a Nuzlocke race, what do you think’. They said ‘here’s what we’re thinking, BAM'” and slapped his hand.

“We thought they were going to kick us,” Yang added.

Ellis explained: “They said ‘we consider this to be on the same level as using a hacked game, ROM hacks’. I thought, excuse me? This is the style of playing a game that anyone can buy, there is no hacking.”

Yang then claimed, “There were a lot of creators playing a Nuzlocke style with Pokémon that were deleted from their creator program.”

The Pokémon Company’s brief statement appears to dispute this claim.

A potential problem could be that even though the default rules for a Nuzlocke race are simple, any player watching Nuzlocke races could potentially discover some hacked Pokémon games that include specific Nuzlocke modes.

The Pokémon Company may therefore have decided not to promote Nuzlocke runs on Nintendo Minute, in case viewers decided to look into them and discovered unauthorized hacked games.

After posting the company’s statement, Merrick added his own view, saying, “The fact is, no content creator has been turned away from any program for making simple Nuzlockes, and TPCi has worked with many who have.”

He added: “They don’t care as long as you follow the boundaries of what’s possible in the game.”