The Pebble was the first smartwatch that genuinely delivered on the promise of smart wearables, but despite a devoted user base, it was not long for this world, and was eventually bought by Fitbit. Despite the company no longer existing, the smartwatches still work just fine, and developers are still making apps for them, including what appears to be an impressive and playable Pokémon clone called Pebblemon.
According to the game’s developer, Harrison Allen, Pebblemon uses a graphics library they created that replicates Pokémon Yellow, which was the first version of the popular game series to take advantage of the Game Boy Colour’s limited colour palette. As a result, while Pebblemon appears to be playable using the Pebble smartwatch’s buttons (the wearable lacked a touchscreen), it’s a smaller version of the original game featuring “various areas within the Johto region” but players will still “Encounter all 251 Pokemon from the Game Boy Colour games” and will still be able to find items to help them out during gameplay.
Pebblemon is currently available through the Rebble.io repository, which was created shortly after the company died as a place to continue to allow users to maintain their smart wearables, and to give developers a way to distribute new apps. If you don’t already use it, you’ll have to jump through a few hoops to get it to play nice with your Pebble watch, but it doesn’t appear terribly difficult. Alternately, Allen has provided all of his source code through GitHub, if you’re in the mood to compile or adapt it into something else yourself.
There are two things to keep in mind if you want to try Pebblemon out: it’s only compatible with the Pebble Time, Pebble Time Round, and Pebble 2 models — not the original version of the wearable — and you’re going to want to jump on this as soon as possible because there’s a very good chance Nintendo’s eager lawyers are already aware of the game, and are already working to wipe it off the face of the Earth.
Comments