Nintendo is a difficult company to predict when it comes to the re-releasing of older games. On the one hand, Nintendo has re-released many classic NES, SNES and N64 games multiple times and in multiple formats, and they even re-released several hit Gamecube games on the more popular Wii. On the other hand, Nintendo seems much less interested in giving you the original game, when they can 'update' the game and give you a more modernized version of it.
Despite that, I can't recall too many cases in which Nintendo left a game in almost its original form, but made an outdated feature from the game work again with modern hardware. One incident that comes in mind was the way they made Pokémon Snap work on the Wii Virtual Console. In the original N64 game, there was a promotional partnership with Blockbuster or some other company where you could take your memory card to the store and print out pictures you took of the Pokémon in-game. They sort of mimicked this feature with the Wii hardware, enabling people to save some pictures they took to the Wii. But that is one very rare example.
Looking at current offerings on the eShop, there are already games available on the virtual console service that can't make full use of their original features. One example is Zelda Link's Awakening DX, which had a mini-game where you could get this mouse photographer to take pictures of you throughout the game, and then print them out using the Gameboy Printer. The Gameboy Printer did not have a very lasting appeal, and went the way of the dinosaur pretty fast, but that feature still remains in the game and there's no way to actually 'print' the picture in the virtual console version. Another example is Mario Tennis for the GBC, which originally let you transfer your in-game characters over to the N64 version of Mario Tennis to play as them against Mario and co. You obviously have no way to connect the virtual console version of Mario Tennis GBC to the N64 game, so that's another relic of the past.
Of course, they could release it as an eShop game and not a virtual console title, complete with new features. (Like other indie games such as Cave Story and Pushmo, or the '3D' releases of Kid Icarus and Kirby's Adventure.) But one has to wonder if Nintendo would really go that far just to make it possible to transfer pokemon from gen 1 to gen 6. After all, nobody at Nintendo bothers localizing their older games on Virtual Console for Western audiences - the Japan-only titles that did see release on the service outside of Japan were ones with very little text to begin with, or ones that were pretty much in English already such as Sin and Punishment. That wouldn't take much effort, but nobody at Nintendo sees the point. It also takes them years to upload this or that old game to the service. Fans can translate and emulate everything much faster than these big companies.
I would also think trying to transfer a gen 1 pokemon to X and Y would cause some weird problems somewhere along the lines because pokemon don't learn the same exact movesets anymore, and some have had type changes. Also, in gen 1 and 2 each move type was considered either physical or special, while nowadays any move type can be either physical or special. I just imagine there being some sort of conflict, but maybe it's something they could work out - much like how transferring a gen 1 pokemon to gen 2 gave them a gender.
I'd say there is a possibility of Nintendo maybe one day releasing Pokémon Red and Blue on the eShop. but considering that the eShop has been around since like 2006 and none of the main series pokemon games were released for it yet, I'd say it just doesn't seem like something Nintendo is interested in doing. But if they did release it, I would just be surprised that they did that much, and I would probably have to re-purchase Blue again.
Log in to comment