BODY: Fans who grew up battling through Kanto on the Game Boy Advance now have a date to circle. On August 13, The Pokémon Company announced that the Nintendo Switch ports of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen will gain Pokémon HOME compatibility in October 2026 — letting players ferry their classic-era creatures into the wider modern ecosystem.
Pokémon HOME is the cloud service that acts as a hub connecting mainline titles, allowing trainers to deposit, manage, and transfer their monsters across generations. Bringing the 2004 remakes into that network is a meaningful bridge, giving long-dormant Pokémon a path forward into current games.
There's a notable catch, however. The Pokémon Company made clear that illegitimate or tampered Pokémon will be refused entry — effectively "banned" from moving through HOME. That aligns with the company's long-running crackdown on hacked, cloned, or otherwise manipulated data that has plagued trades and online play for years.
According to the report, the restrictions appear aimed squarely at exploits such as arbitrary code execution. The original Game Boy Advance games are notorious in the speedrunning and homebrew scenes for glitches that let players inject and run custom code through carefully manipulated in-game states. Screening transfers is the company's way of ensuring those tricks can't leak dangerous or malformed data into the broader Pokémon HOME environment.
The insider take
From Tokyo, this reads as classic Pokémon Company caution. The firm has spent the past few generations tightening data integrity, and re-releasing decades-old code on modern hardware is exactly the kind of move that keeps its engineers up at night — those old GBA titles are a playground for exploit hunters. Expect the "出禁" (deny-entry) framing to reassure the domestic playerbase, who take competitive and trade fairness seriously, that legacy nostalgia won't come at the cost of a compromised ecosystem. The October window also neatly rides the wave of renewed interest in Kanto ahead of the franchise's ongoing anniversary momentum.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).