How an AI rebuilt Pokémon Red from raw pixels

Pokémon Claude Red was built by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, working in Claude Code and directed by Levy Street. The game contains no image files: every tile, sprite, building and battle effect is drawn pixel by pixel by code.

Drawing with code

• Each map cell has a label like "tall grass" or "roof", and a painter function draws it with shading and texture.
• Each of the 151 Pokémon is a list of shapes (ellipses, polygons, stripes, eyes) that the game rasterises, shades and outlines at runtime; back sprites and icons come from the same description.
• Characters are small typed templates recoloured for each trainer, which is also how the character creator works.

Standing on 1996

Map layouts, trainers, wild Pokémon, moves and the music's note data are converted from the pret/pokered disassembly, so the game plays like the original, glitches included. The story text was rewritten in new words.

Open source

The code is on GitHub.