Play an all-new version of Pokémon Red

Road to Infinity is a free adventure video game utility wherein you can challenge yourself in a deliberately glitchy journey. Developed by TheZZAZZGlitch, this is a Pokémon Red hack that lets you play the game on a procedurally generated map—allowing for infinite battles and high scores on how long you can last. 

Take note that this “program” is actually a save file. You have to load it into your emulator and to a copy of Pokémon Red in order to use it. While it’s technically a hack, knowing about hacking isn’t required for this. This tool was created for the developer’s 2021 April Fool’s event.

Take your adventure to new heights

Pokémon Red Version and Pokémon Blue Version—known simply as Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue—are 1996 role-playing video games developed by Game Freak and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Game Boy console. As the very first installments of the Pokémon franchise, there were bound to be some bugs and glitches in them. However, not all are bad and one of those paved the way for a game within a game.

Road to Infinity is pretty much this for Pokémon Red. With it, you can play an entirely new adventure that entails exploring a procedurally generated map of the game. Items, enemies, and obtainable Pokémon will be randomly placed, so your goal is to survive for as long as you can. This is done by exploiting arbitrary code execution (ACE), which involves reprogramming a bug by just loading a save file.

This is why the download file is a save file rather than a ROM. Load it into a Game Boy emulator like mGBA, and you’re good to go. However, this means that you can’t play this hack without an English copy of Pokémon Red specifically. Additionally, while there had been an online leaderboard when this was released, it was only active for the event.

Can’t be played alone

All in all, Road to Infinity is a nice change of pace for Pokémon Red if you’re tired of the base game. Not only does it introduce an entirely new mechanic to the game itself, but you don’t need to know how to hack games to make them run. However, it’s strictly dependent on the base game, and the online leaderboard can no longer be used.