All Pokémon games in order: chronologically and by release date

By Sam Hill, Jesse Lennox and Lloyd Coombes Updated October 17, 2025

Arguably the most popular of all Nintendo franchises, Pokémon is a cultural phenomenon that’s not going anywhere. For nearly 30 years, we’ve travelled across regions, capturing critters in Pokeballs, and putting them to work helping us be the best, like no one ever was. From the Game Boy to the Switch 2, everyone has their favorite ‘Mon, type, generation and game, but how do they fit together? Which generation is set where in the timeline, and which Legends game should come first?

Thankfully, we’ve put on our Professor Oak outfit and set out to research which game comes when, so that if you’re lucky to own every entry, you can play through them in order ahead of the next mainline generation yet to come. It wasn’t easy, but we did our best to work out the full chronological timeline for Pokémon as well as the more straightforward release date order. Expect the next generation to appear on our upcoming Switch 2 games list soon, too.

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.