Pokémon: Let's Go runs on Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator... sort of

Pokémon: Let’s Go is a major success for Nintendo. It just became the fastest selling Switch game of all time with a combined 3 million units sold between the two versions, and it has garnered critical success with multiple review outlets. Is it any wonder, then, that hackers have already gotten the game to run on an emulator?

A recent YouTube video shows the game running on the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu. While the game boots and gameplay is mostly present, there are substantial glitches and hiccups that keep the title from being playable. For one, the framerate is all over the place; some sections run incredibly fast while others struggle to move along. Audio is also horribly out of sync and distorted, and text is a garbled mess of indecipherable black bars.

Still, the fact that someone has gotten a week-old game to boot and run at all on a current-gen console emulator is astounding. It should be noted that the test system for this emulation run is fairly high-end, boasting an Intel Core i7-7700K and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080. Development will likely continue with both Yuzu and the Pokémon: Let’s Go ROM; at this rate, it might be fully playable in a few months (or even weeks).

Older retro gamers who remember the wild west of late 90’s emulation will remember how difficult it was to get a 15-year-old system to run smoothly on powerful PC hardware. We are now in an age where current generation consoles that are at the start of their life cycle are being emulated reasonably well, and games that have just come to retail can run on an emulator at all.

What a time for emulation.

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