About nuzlockes.gg

What is a Nuzlocke?

A Nuzlocke is a self-imposed challenge run of a Pokémon game. There are a ton of different variations on the Nuzlocke, but there are two core rules that basically every run will follow:

Most Nuzlockers ALSO name their Pokémon, and although this doesn’t technically disqualify you, it’s highly encouraged. That way your heart gets crushed just a bit more when Bingus the Excadrill dies to a Superpower.

These core rules totally transform the beloved Pokémon games that you’ve probably spent hundreds if not THOUSANDS of hours playing. If you’ve ever had the thought that Pokémon is too easy, or that this was much harder as a kid, maybe a Nuzlocke is the exact type of challenge you’re looking for.

Where did it come from?

The Nuzlocke challenge was brought to life in the early 2010s by a guy who started posting a Pokémon Fire Red comic online. He named it after the Nuzleaf on his team, as well as a Locke from Lost. The rules spread throughout the internet via forums, until it grew into what it’s become today.

The Nuzlocke challenge has been built upon a TON in the last decade and a half, and there have been tons of ROM Hacks designed to make the familiar Pokémon franchise more challenging, thought provoking, and creative. Especially for seasoned veteran Nuzlockers.

So why does this site exist?

For a long time, if you wanted to track or share your Nuzlocke runs, your options were a spreadsheet, a Discord post, or a tweet. There was no central place to submit a completed Hall of Fame run, no leaderboard to see who else had survived a given game, no way to track your in-progress attempts without building your own system.

nuzlockes.gg is that place. It’s a leaderboard and run tracker built specifically for the Nuzlocke community:

• ›Submit your completed runs and have them celebrated by others
• ›Track in-progress attempts split by split
• ›See who else has beaten the games you’re struggling with and discover their socials! We have Youtube, Twitch, and Discord linking and integration
• ›Browse Hall of Fame teams and find inspiration for your next attempt or game!
• ›If you’re a dev and want your Hall of Fames to be verified, we’ll handle sending you the requests and all you need to do is just review! We can even appoint your mod team :) Otherwise, by default, all runs are unmoderated unless they’re, like, REALLY egrecious lol. We want to lower the barrier of entry to everyone!

It’s built by people in the community, for the community. The games listed here are fan-nominated and OPTIONALLY mod-verified. We want to be able to celebrate everyone’s achievements for their runs! And if you did a bug-only run of Royal Sapphire you go girl!!

ready to join?

(don’t worry, we won’t judge you for losing to Roxanne. we’ve all been there.)