3D Hubs is Celebrating Twenty Years of Pokémon with Adorable Low Poly Pocket Monsters

We were first introduced to the wonderful world of Pokémon twenty years ago in a pair of hugely popular RPG video games for the original Game Boy back in 1996. The concept was pretty simple; you play as a human Pokémon trainer who captures adorable little creatures and teaches them to fight each other. It didn’t take long for the game to explode in popularity, and over the years it has spawned dozens of follow-up video games, long running cartoons, comics, movies, toys and of course a massively popular trading card game.

Today Pokémon is the second most successful and profitable video game franchise in the world, having raked in almost forty billion dollars since the first games were released, and it is eclipsed only by the Mario Bros. franchise. In 2014 alone the Pokémon franchise and all of its merchandise pulled in well over two billion dollars. Even after twenty years the game remains hugely popular and characters like Pikachu, Bulbasaur, Squirtle and Charmander are some of the most recognizable pop culture characters in the world.

Low Poly Pokémon designed by Agustin Flowalistik.

For the twentieth anniversary Nintendo is planning to re-release versions of Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow, the first group of games from the long-running series. They will also be launching Pokémon GO, a version of the game that heavily uses augmented reality and encourages players to go outside and discover new Pokémon and fellow trainers to battle. The game was developed for smartphones and will come with a Bluetooth-enabled device that will notify players when there are Pokémon in need of capturing nearby.

Beyond the official celebrations planned for the milestone, many of the loyal fans in the Pokémon community are planning to celebrate in their own way. Paris-based 3D designer Agustin Flowalistik designs simple and clever 3D printable models and objects and is perhaps most well known for his adorable low poly Pokémon figures. 3D printing services locator 3D Hubs decided to team up with Flowalistik to celebrate Pokémon’s twentieth birthday by making it super easy for their users to have any of his great figures, or all ten of them, 3D printed by local hubs.

“The Low Poly Pokémon project started as a challenge. I wanted to try to transform the low-quality graphics the first Pokémon video games had into a 3D model. I focused this project on 3D printing, as the low poly style allows 3d printers to create high-quality models and avoid many of the limitations associated with 3D printing,” Flowalistik told 3D Hubs.

This weekend 3D Hubs launched the Pokémon Collection where users can either download the 3D models directly to 3D print themselves, or simply send a request for a quote over to a local 3D printer owner. Their online quote process is really quite simple: just select the 3D printable file that you would like a quote on, select the type of material that you are looking for and pick the Hub nearest to you. If you don’t have a 3D printer of your own, then 3D Hubs is simply the easiest way to find a 3D printing services provider who is local to you. Head on over to the Pokémon page on 3D Hubs and catch all of Flowalistik’s low poly pocket monsters. Are you a fan? Tell us in the 3D Printed Pokemon forum over at 3DPB.com.