Key Takeaways
- Pokémon and Fender have officially announced a 30th anniversary guitar collaboration, revealed on October 30, 2026
- Two Made-in-Japan guitars are included: a Pokémon Red Version Stratocaster (red) and a Pokémon Green Version Telecaster (green)
- Both guitars feature pixel art inspired by the original Pokémon Game Boy games
- A special toggle on each guitar switches the audio to 8-bit sound, recreating the original Game Boy audio experience
- Each guitar includes a custom neck plate commemorating Pokémon’s 30th anniversary and the Fender collaboration
- The guitars will be available through Pokémon Center, with preorders opening soon — but an exact date hasn’t been confirmed
- Both models release in 2027 — no pricing or production quantity has been announced
- The collaboration is part of Pokémon’s year-long 30th anniversary celebrations since the original Japanese launch in 1996
Pokémon’s 30th anniversary celebrations have already brought a Game Boy Jukebox, a McDonald’s Happy Meal collab, a Beats speaker collection, and a wave of special merch. Now the franchise is leveling up its anniversary roster with something genuinely unexpected: a partnership with legendary guitar manufacturer Fender, producing two limited-edition electric guitars directly inspired by the original Game Boy games that started it all.
The Two Pokémon x Fender Anniversary Guitars
Announced on October 30, 2026, the collaboration introduces two separate Made-in-Japan instruments, each tied to one of the original Pokémon titles:
The Pokémon Red Version Stratocaster is finished in red, paying direct homage to the iconic first game — Pokémon Red — that launched in Japan on February 27, 1996. The Pokémon Green Version Telecaster comes in green, a nod to Pokémon Green, the Japan-exclusive counterpart to Pokémon Red that Western audiences largely know as the Blue version.
Both instruments are built by Fender in Japan, maintaining the quality and craftsmanship of the Made in Japan line — a tier Fender uses for high-quality instruments that blend traditional Japanese craftsmanship with the company’s classic designs. These aren’t novelty toys. They’re full electric guitars that happen to come with some extraordinary cosmetic and sonic features tied to one of the biggest gaming franchises ever made.
Pixel Art Design and the 8-Bit Audio Toggle
The standout visual feature on both guitars is pixel art directly inspired by the original Game Boy games. The Pokémon imagery is worked into Fender’s classic body shapes — the Stratocaster’s familiar double-cutaway curves and the Telecaster’s angular single-cutaway silhouette — in a way that blends retro gaming culture with guitar culture without either looking out of place.
But the most genuinely impressive feature isn’t visual — it’s sonic. Both guitars include a special toggle switch that converts the guitar’s audio output to 8-bit sound, allowing musicians to reproduce the distinctive sound palette of the original Game Boy era. Playing through that toggle would let a guitarist reproduce something close to the bleepy, crunchy, waveform-based audio of the original Pokémon games’ soundtrack — the kind of sound that defined an entire generation of gaming and remains instantly recognizable 30 years later.
It’s a feature that puts these guitars in genuinely interesting territory. Fender has done gaming collaborations before — the company partnered with Bandai Namco for a Pac-Man Telecaster in May 2026 and worked with Capcom on a Monster Hunter Rathalos Telecaster in 2024. Both of those were visually themed but sonically standard. A literal 8-bit audio toggle puts the Pokémon collaboration in a different category — it’s a functional tribute to Game Boy sound design built into the hardware of a real instrument.
Rounding out the package, each guitar also features a custom neck plate commemorating Pokémon’s 30th anniversary and the Fender collaboration — a detail that collectors and serious fans will appreciate, and one that marks these instruments as specific artifacts of this anniversary moment rather than generic branded merchandise.
Where to Buy and When
Both guitars will be available through the Pokémon Center. The official Pokémon account announced on X that preorders will be “coming soon,” but no specific date has been confirmed at the time of writing. The release window is 2027, and neither pricing nor production quantities have been revealed — meaning it’s not yet clear whether these will be broadly available, limited to a specific run, or something in between.
Given the nature of Fender gaming collaborations and the significance of Pokémon’s 30th anniversary, limited availability seems probable. The Monster Hunter Rathalos Telecaster was made available globally but was treated as a premium collector’s item, priced around $2,000 for the global model. The Pac-Man Player II Telecaster came in at around $1,100. The Pokémon guitars are Made in Japan models, which tend to sit at a premium price point above Fender’s standard Player series — but without confirmed pricing, that’s speculation until the preorder details land.
If you want to be first in line when preorders open, the Pokémon Center website and official Pokémon social channels are the place to watch.
A Milestone Year of Pokémon Collaborations
The Fender announcement caps off what has been a remarkable year of 30th anniversary tie-ins for the franchise. Pokémon kicked off the celebrations on February 27, 2026 with the announcement of the Game Boy Jukebox — a miniature Game Boy-shaped music player with 45 swappable mini cartridges playing tracks from the original Pokémon Red and Blue soundtracks, developed with original composer Junichi Masuda to sound as close to real Game Boy audio as possible. That sold out quickly across multiple regions.
Since then, the anniversary train has kept moving: Beats announced a limited Pikachu and Mimikyu speaker collaboration, Pokémon teamed up with Marshmello and Alison Wonderland for a first-ever EDM concert event, and most recently McDonald’s confirmed a new Pokémon Happy Meal collection launching November 10 with 15 toys and 15 trading cards rolling out across 70+ countries. The Fender guitars bring in an entirely new audience — musicians and guitar collectors — and represent perhaps the most premium physical product tied to the anniversary so far.
With the mainline Pokémon games continuing forward (Pokémon Winds and Waves is slated for 2027 on Nintendo Switch 2) and the anniversary collaborations showing no signs of slowing, Pokémon’s 30th year is shaping up to be one of the most active periods of merchandise and partnership activity the franchise has ever seen.
For more gaming news, check out our coverage of the World of Warcraft Grimtide housing controversy, the EA layoffs and what workers are saying about the company culture, and Silent Hill: Townfall’s major Halloween update.
