Pokémon Prism Official Trailer Released! (ROM Hack)

Back when I first started creating Alt:Mag as a magazine 5 years ago, one of the main articles in the first issue was going to discuss the wonderful Pokémon ROM hacking community. One of the ROM hacks I made sure to put pride and place in the 'Hall of Fame' section was a work-in-progress hack of the Game Boy Color game Pokémon Gold called Prism, which was made by an awesome dude who goes by the name of Koolboyman... and what an excellent work-in-progress it was. I have always loved the Gold, Silver and Crystal games for their expansive gameplay and the incredible amount of things you could get up to in the massive worlds they took place in - so to see a ROM hack like Prism attempt (and succeed) to take the expansive nature of those games and push things even further blew my mind.
I reached out to Koolboyman via Twitter and even put together an interview for what became a two page spread on Pokémon ROM hacks for the magazine, but eventually the magazine was scrapped in favour of writing articles on this here website. That two page spread still exists though and I'll even display it below for you (click on the pictures to see bigger versions).

Anyway, enough about Alt:Mag, and more about Pokémon Prism, because earlier today the main man Koolboyman (man) posted up a very exciting trailer for a new build of Pokémon Prism and oh my gosh, it has got me absolutely hyped beyond belief. It looks AWESOME. Prism was already fantastic when I played its Summer 2010 beta, but now we're getting a full version?!? The planets have aligned. This is an incredible day for the Pokémon ROM hacking community because here we have a ROM hack that truly shows the extent of how much you can really modify these games to create something completely new and original. Just watch the trailer below and you'll see what I mean:

The features shown off in the video are just a taste of what is yet to come, but damn I'm so stoked for this. Some features that really caught my eye include the fact that there is not 16, but 20 badges to collect and that there's also newer Pokémon like Sylveon in Prism included in the hack - complete with well-animated sprite art that looks like it came straight from an official Pokémon game. The main feature that made my jaw drop however was the new changes to character customisation. In the Summer 2010 beta you could change your sprite in shops, but now you can now choose from a number of different female and male character models and completely modify their hair and clothes colour, as well as their skin tone. Now that's just amazing.

The hack has been given a tentative release date of December, which isn't too long to wait, but for now you can keep up-to-date on Prism's progress on the Facebook page and Koolboyman's Twitter page as well as the hack's respective thread on the PokéCommunity forums.