You’ve Played Pokémon, But Have You Played Pokémon on a Watermelon?

The Pokémon franchise extends across many forms of media, including anime, manga, feature films, and a trading card game. But it all started with video games released for the original Nintendo Game Boy. The first two Game Boy games were released simultaneously as Pocket Monsters: Red and Green (Pokémon Red and Blue outside of Japan) in 1996. Most of the later releases followed a similar convention of releasing two versions of the game at the same time. You’ve probably played some of those games, but Cedrick Tan took it a step further and played Pokémon Emeraldon a watermelon.

Pokémon Emerald was released for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance in 2004 in Japan (2005 for the rest of the world). In case you never owned a Game Boy Advance yourself, let me make something clear: it was not a watermelon. The GBA was a fairly conventional handheld video game console. But, thanks to the power of modern console emulation, you can play GBA games on a bunch of different hardware. One of the most popular ways to do that today is by using a Raspberry Pi computer with software like RetroPie to run a GBA emulator. Usually the hardware is housed within some sort of plastic enclosure, but Tan decided to use a watermelon instead.

Tan started this project by purchasing a real, if small, watermelon from his local grocery store. He then cut out a small section of rind and carefully scooped out all of the melon’s juicy innards to leave just a clean husk behind. Openings were cut into the removed section of the rind for the buttons and video screen. The inside of the watermelon was lined with plastic wrap to avoid electronic shorts and stickiness. The rest of the project is standard for a RetroPie build, with the emulator running on a Raspberry Pi. Power comes from an external battery packed via a USB cable running through the shell of the melon. Tan even integrated a speaker for sound. The watermelon console obviously won’t last long before it rots, but it is hilarious to watch Tan play it in public until that happens.