Culture

‘Rick And Morty’ Is Getting Its Own Pokémon-Style Mobile Game, So That’s Your 2016 Down The Drain

Welp, you gave being productive this year a crack.

by Alex McKinnon  6 January 2016

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Before the advent of widespread internet, and while waiting for the eighteenth birthday that would let you legally drink, smoke and be generally irresponsible, the Pokémon series of Gameboy games were hands-down the most addictive substances a kid could get their hands on. I once spent the entirety of a nine-hour flight to Vietnam playing Pokémon Red on the in-flight entertainment system, and the sense of crushing loss I felt on having to abandon my game and go on holiday in one of the world’s most beautiful countries haunts me to this day. Truly, mine is a harrowing story.

Now the spirit of those infuriatingly moreish games is being revived in the best way imaginable. Earlier today, Rick and Morty creator and showrunner Dan Harmon announced via Twitter that the Adult Swim show is getting its very own Pokémon-style mobile game, free to download from January 14. It looks absolutely delightful.

Pocket Mortys — a pretty blatant reference to ‘Pocket Monsters’, the ‘real’ name of Pokémon — sees you play as Rick on a quest to collect, train and battle as many different iterations of Morty as you can muster. The premise harks back to that of the season one Rick and Morty episode ‘Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind’, where an infinite number of Ricks and Mortys from an infinite number of parallel universes would routinely cross over and interact with each other.

Like that episode, each Rick and Morty you encounter in Pocket Mortys has some slight variation that makes them distinctive — Evil Rick, Tiny Morty, Scared Rick, Pirate Morty. Hopefully you can teach your Mortys various attacks, like Pokemon, and heal them through horrifying and traumatising means like Rick does in the show.

I am going to play the absolute crap out of this game. I am going to get nothing done in 2016. This is quite possibly how I die.