About

Through this project, my main research question was “How has the use of color in video games evolved over time?” Color is a very important aspect of game design, so I wanted to be able to showcase the evolution of color use in the context of video games. I also wanted to create this project to find out if games are getting more colorful, and determine how the evolution of gaming hardware has impacted game design and experiences. Additionally, I wanted to showcase and exhibit the changes in game design and color due to the development of new consoles and technologies. This project is mostly intended for game developers and creators who want to study colors in games to be able to influence their own games, but I also wanted it to be for anyone with an interest in video games and their history overall.

After thinking about my scope, I decided to analyze the 9 mainline Pokémon games through full video playthroughs from YouTube. I decided on the Pokémon franchise for several reasons, one being that in a cultural context, Pokémon is one of the highest grossing franchises of all time, and is extremely recognizable in today’s culture. Additionally, choosing one genre and franchise of game allows me to see the changes in color over time without having skewed data due to different genres having different colors. (A horror game would have a very different color scheme than a sandbox game like Minecraft for example) Lastly, since there are only 9 mainline Pokémon games, it fit into the scope of my project.

Unlike many other games, whenever a mainline Pokémon game is released, it is released as two separate similar games that are only slightly different from each other. To deal with this, I decided to go with the more popular of the two for this project.

The first Pokémon game, Pokémon Blue and Red was released for the original GameBoy in 1998. The Game Boy was the very first handheld console that Nintendo released, released in 1989. Since then, Nintendo has released many consoles such as the GameBoy Color, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo Switch as well as other variations. Over the 24 year period that all of the Pokémon games mainline have been released from 1998-2022, the games have been released specifically for 6 different platforms, all with increasingly evolving technology.

Ultimately, the 9 games that I ended up using for this project in order were:
          1. Pokémon Blue
          2. Pokémon Silver
          3. Pokémon Ruby
          4. Pokémon Diamond
          5. Pokémon Black
          6. Pokémon X
          7. Pokémon Sun
          8. Pokémon Sword
          9. Pokémon Violet

If you want to explore more about the history of the evolution of Nintendo and their released consoles, I recommend the following resource:

• Nintendo Timeline


This project began in October of 2024, and is currently ongoing!