Gamer compiles Pokémon Legends: Arceus to run natively on PC, no emulator required

Pokémon may be playable on PC without emulation.

A post on Reddit went live earlier today showing a screenshot of what appears to be Pokémon Legends: Arceus running natively in Windows. That means the game is running as an executable program in Windows rather than as a ROM file in an emulator. 

User capitalggamer1 posted the screenshot with the message, “This is so epic I hope it happens to more nintendo games” [sic]. The game is running in an application called “Nintendo NX Application,” which could either be a development environment for building Nintendo Switch games in Windows or some kind of wrapper or custom application for running Switch games natively in the OS.

According to the Reddit thread, this is not a port of Pokémon Legends: Arceus, but rather is an application compiled from the game’s source code to run on x64 hardware. The source code for this game (and many other Pokémon titles) was included in the massive Game Freak data leak that was released earlier this month.

There is very little information concerning this version of the game other than the screenshot, so take this news with a grain of salt. It is plausible that the game can be compiled from the source code included in the leak, but (for obvious reasons) there are no links to access either the source code or the compiled game files readily available. Considering the state of Switch emulation and Nintendo’s watch dog tactics, it’s unlikely the compiled version of this game (or any other Switch title) will see the light of day.

Of course, you can always buy a Nintendo Switch at Amazon (curr. $279.99) and play the game legitimately.