Pokémon Brick Bronze

» see roblox.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I was 34 the year this died, and Roblox's players were overwhelmingly children. An age gap and a platform I had no reason to open is the whole of my distance from it. Pokémon reached Turkey in my teens as the cartoon and the trading cards rather than as the handheld games, since a Game Boy was an expensive import here and nothing was localized, so even the original article is something I watched other people love.

Brick Bronze was a Pokémon game that ran inside somebody else's game. Roblox hands anybody a 3D engine with a scripting language attached and distributes whatever they build to the whole platform for free, and what Llama Train Studio did with that was a complete handheld-style RPG, with a new region and a story of its own. Battles were turn-based against gym leaders and wild encounters, and the starter choice offered 21 Pokémon pulled from across the series. Your progress followed your Roblox account, so the same save was waiting on a school laptop and on a phone.

The people making it were young. Kotaku's Cecilia D'Anastasio visited the project in August 2017 and found a director known as Lando64000, who had started building on Roblox at 16, working with his brother as head developer and around a dozen contributors over the game's life. One of them, a musician, made four figures across a year for 51 tracks. The money was real, paid out through Roblox's developer exchange and funded by in-game purchases.

By that summer it was holding roughly 22,000 players at any given moment and was comfortably the biggest of the many Pokémon games on the platform. At the 2017 Bloxy Awards it took four prizes, Game of the Year among them. Asked about where the sprites and the music had come from, the director declined to comment.

~ the dossier ~

~ the part that was always going to happen ~

Every fan Pokémon project carries the same unexploded charge, and Brick Bronze was carrying more of it than most. It used the official logo and the official creature designs, over music that sat very close to the originals, and unlike a fan game distributed as a free download it was inside a storefront taking payments. Roblox's model means a popular game earns its developers money, which turns a tribute into a commercial use of somebody else's characters.

Nintendo's record here needed no interpreting. Pokémon Uranium had been pulled down in 2016 after nine years of development, and a long row of ROM hacks and browser clones had gone the same way before it. The question was never whether this would end, only what the notice would say when it came.

~ the four days of not knowing ~

On 18 April 2018 the game was simply gone from Roblox, along with the badges players had earned inside it. There was no announcement attached to the deletion, so the first coverage came from players: a Reddit thread, then press picking the story up on 23 April, still describing Nintendo's involvement as a running theory rather than a fact. The one concrete figure in that early reporting was the player count, "usually with 22,000 players at any given time."

The explanation came from the director's own Twitter account four days after the deletion, confirming a DMCA notice from The Pokémon Company and the end of development. Then came the refund question, because children had spent Robux on a product that no longer existed, and the money had gone partly to the developers and partly to the platform.

~ what the team did next ~

Llama Train Studio did not stop. They kept the parts of the work that were actually theirs, the engine code and the systems built on top of it, and made Loomian Legacy with original creatures and original art. It launched in 2019 and is still running on Roblox years later, with the studio intact and nothing in it belonging to anyone else.

The game itself persists the way deleted Roblox games do, as reconstructions that reappear on the platform under adjacent names. The Internet Archive has captures of a "Pokémon Brick Bronze Returns" page from March 2025 and another revival listing from that June, neither of them official and neither of them permanent. There is no archive in the ordinary sense, because a Roblox game lives on the platform's servers, so a deleted one is deleted everywhere at once.

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