Price Check

Welcome to the Poke Mart! Every item on these shelves comes with its real price from Red, Blue, Gold, Silver and Crystal. Slide to your guess, lock it in, and find out how well you really know the price of a Potion.

How do I play Price Check?

Money, you spend a whole childhood's worth of it in Poke Marts, and I would bet you never once stopped to memorize the price tags. Each round shows you an item the way the game describes it in your bag, you drag the slider to what you think it costs in Pokedollars, and you lock it in. The slider is logarithmic, which means the stretch from 100 to 1,000 is exactly as long as the stretch from 1,000 to 10,000 (that is how prices feel in the games anyway, a Potion and a Protein live in completely different universes). If you would rather type, the box under the slider takes any whole number up to 999,999 (the most money a wallet can hold, more on that below).

Scoring is symmetric on that same log scale, so guessing double the real price costs you exactly as much as guessing half of it. Nail the price and you get 100 points, miss by a factor of two in either direction and you get 67, miss by a factor of eight or more and you get zero. The Daily is the same ten items for everybody on a given UTC date, two from each fifth of the price list from cheapest to priciest, and Endless deals out fresh sets of ten for as long as you want to keep shopping. Which costs more? is the quick version: two items from the same game, tap the pricier one, and see how long your streak survives once the price gaps start shrinking.

The game covers the 106 items a regular shop will actually sell you, 48 in Red and Blue and 58 in Gold, Silver and Crystal, at their regular prices. Red and Blue never describe their items at all (no, really, look it up, the bag just shows names), so every card uses the description Crystal prints for the same item, and a TM shows Crystal's description of the move it teaches.

Where do these prices come from?

Every number here comes straight out of the disassemblies of the games. Red and Blue keep their prices in a table called ItemPrices, three bytes per item in binary-coded decimal, the same six-digit format your wallet uses, which is why the most money you can ever hold is 999,999. The addition routine does not even pretend, when your wallet overflows it just fills every digit with nines. Technical Machines get their own tiny table where each price is a single nybble counted in thousands, so every Red and Blue TM costs 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 or 5,000, never anything in between. The Celadon rooftop vending machine keeps a third little list of its own: Fresh Water for 200, Soda Pop for 300 and Lemonade for 350.

Gold, Silver and Crystal tidied all of that up. The price now lives inside each item's attribute block as an ordinary two-byte number, and TMs became regular items with regular prices. Selling works the same way in both generations, the shop pays you half. Red and Blue halve the total with a decimal division routine, Gold, Silver and Crystal shift the number one bit to the right, and either way a 9,800 Protein sells back for 4,900. (Red and Blue also refuse to buy key items and HMs from you at all, which is honestly fair.)

What is the most expensive thing you can buy?

In Red and Blue it is a five-way tie at 9,800: HP UP, PROTEIN, IRON, CARBOS and CALCIUM, all on the fifth floor of the Celadon Department Store. The cheapest thing on any Kanto shelf is an ANTIDOTE at 100. Gold, Silver and Crystal keep the vitamins at 9,800 and add two surprise members to the club. One is CHARCOAL at the Azalea Mart. The other is SLOWPOKETAIL, sold by the pharmacist behind the counter in Mahogany Town, who turns out to be guarding the secret staircase to Team Rocket's hideout ("Arrgh... You found the secret stairway..."). Its bag description is "Very tasty. Sell high." At least he is upfront about it! Once the Rockets are gone, a granny takes over the counter and sells RAGECANDYBAR instead. At the bottom of the Johto price list sit five kinds of MAIL at 50 each, the cheapest things you can buy anywhere in the two generations.

The priciest tag in either price table is not on any shelf at all. A NUGGET is listed at 10,000 in both generations, but no shop sells one at that price. You find them lying around, win one as the "fabulous prize" for beating the five trainers on NUGGET BRIDGE in Red and Blue, or buy one cheap from a very specific old man in Johto (more on him in a second). Sell one and you get exactly half, which is why a fisherman in the Rock Tunnel Pokemon Center brags that he "sold a useless NUGGET" for 5,000.

Did prices change between Kanto and Johto?

Barely! Leaving the TMs aside, 35 items are sold in both generations, and only two of them changed price. AWAKENING went up from 200 to 250, and HYPER POTION went down from 1,500 to 1,200. The other 33 kept the exact same price tag, Potions are still 300, Poke Balls are still 200, and Ultra Balls are still 1,200. The bigger change is what vanished from the shelves: Red and Blue sell FIRE STONE, THUNDERSTONE, WATER STONE and LEAF STONE for 2,100 each at the Celadon Department Store, and in Gold, Silver and Crystal no shop sells an evolution stone at all, even though they still carry that 2,100 price in the data. (Or as I just realized while checking this, the TM numbers do not line up between the two generations either, TM33 is a 1,000 REFLECT in Kanto and a 3,000 ICE PUNCH in Johto, so do not let the number fool you.)

Can you actually make money in a shop?

Yes, and the game practically begs you to. Every Monday morning an old man in the Goldenrod Underground sells five rare items for less than their listed price, one of each: NUGGET for 4,500, PEARL for 650, BIG PEARL for 3,500, STARDUST for 900 and STAR PIECE for 4,600. Any shop buys them back at half their listed price, so that 4,500 NUGGET sells for 5,000 and every single one of the five turns a profit. Buy the whole table for 14,150, sell it for 15,350, and you walk away 1,200 Pokedollars richer. Once you buy something he closes up for the day, so that is one haul per Monday. Not exactly a get-rich-quick scheme, but it IS a scheme.

Crystal adds one more discount counter. When Camper Todd phones to say there is a sale on, the roof of the Goldenrod Department Store opens a stall: before you enter the Hall of Fame it sells Poke Balls for 150, Great Balls, Super Potions and Full Heals for 500 and Revives for 1,200, and afterwards it switches to Hyper Potions and Ultra Balls for 1,000, Full Restores for 2,000, Full Heals for 500 and Protein for 7,800. The game above always uses the regular price, but the reveal tells you when a sale price exists.

What is the weirdest price in the data?

My favorite is Red and Blue's PP UP. The real PP UP, the one that works, has a price of 0 in the table, while an unused item slot right after NUGGET is also named PP UP and carries the 9,800 price tag. MOON STONE is 0 too, and SAFARI BALL has a price of 1,000 even though it is flagged as a key item, so you can never sell one. Over in Johto, the held items nobody sells have some very strange tags: LEFTOVERS is priced at 200, the same as a Poke Ball, KING'S ROCK and AMULET COIN are 100, and BRIGHTPOWDER, LUCKY PUNCH and every Berry are 10. A shop would happily buy your LEFTOVERS for 100. Please do not.

What is that funny P?

That little P with two lines through its stem is the Pokedollar sign, and the one on this page is not a lookalike from some font, it is tile $F0 of the games' own 8 by 8 font, redrawn one pixel at a time. The source code types it as a yen sign (charmap "¥", $f0), and Crystal's comment next to it calls it the "Poké Dollar sign". Every price and item name in the game above is drawn the same way, straight from the real font tiles: Red and Blue's font for Kanto cards, Crystal's for Johto cards and for all of the bag descriptions. The two fonts are not quite the same, look closely at the 2 and the 5 on a Kanto price tag versus a Johto one!

Your homework: the next time you boot up Crystal on a Monday morning, go pay that old man in the Goldenrod Underground a visit and turn your 1,200 profit, then tell me what you spent it on. If you want more games built from the real data, Weigh-In does it for Pokedex weights and Size Up does it for heights, and if you have an idea for the next one, tell me about it!