All Pokémon games in order: chronologically and by release date

By Sam Hill, Jesse Lennox and Lloyd Coombes Updated December 24, 2025

Among all of Nintendo’s franchises, Pokémon remains unlike anything else. A pop culture phenomenon that’s made Pikachu, Poké Balls, and Ash Ketchum household names. It all began with the games, of course, and with the series spanning systems from the Game Boy to the Switch 2, there’s an awful lot to catch up on.

If you’re new to the series, or looking for a refresh, you’ll want to know which generation is set where, which ‘Mon are in each, and the wider series timeline – especially as there are two Legends games now.

Grab your Pokédex as we take a look at the Pokémon timeline across all the mainline entries and Legends: Arceus and Z-A.

Here are all of the released mainline Pokémon and U.S. release dates. To simplify things, we’ve grouped same-generation expansions that came out in different years but were directly linked. We’re also including remakes here, as many are improved enough to be considered completely new games worth revisiting separately.

Pokémon games have never focused too much on a linear timeline. While the games reference each other, each game is in its own little world for the most part — some characters might reappear, some history lessons may be taught, but you don’t need to know exactly where you sit in the Pokémon universe.

The Pokémon community loves batting around timeline theories, but there is one piece of evidence that suggests there is some sort of official timeline. In 2014, in a now-deleted tweet, one of Game Freak’s head writers laid out the basic timeline of the first six generations of Pokémon games. That’s what we’re going to base the timeline below on.

We’re not going to include remakes here, since they happen at the same time as the original entries in the series. And there aren’t a lot of timestamps in the Pokémon universe, so no in-game dates for these games (although we’ll try to provide context when possible).

That’s the Pokémon timeline as tight as it exists right now. You can certainly play the games in this order and get the feel that time and space are moving forward, even if all the plots don’t line up perfectly.