History of the Randomizer

December 12, 2012, Dabomstew released the first version of the Universal Pokemon Randomizer. It was not the first randomizer of its kind, Artemis251’s Emerald randomizer among others (see Acknowledgements) had already broken the ground of randomizing Pokémon games. What made the UPR stand out was its goal of being able to randomize all then-released Pokémon games, from Gen 1 to Gen 5. Thus, the Universal Pokémon Randomizer.

May 15, 2014, in conjunction with the release of UPR 1.6.1, the Randomizer became open source, hosted on GitHub.

October 21, 2016, Dabomstew stopped working on the project, passing the torch to the community to continue its development and maintenance. This lead to the birth of a multitute of Randomizer branches. Since this website is primarily for the FVX branch, the below history will focus on its lineage. However, this lineage is not the only one. Some notable other branches are mentioned in the section below.

May 8, 2019, the first version of the Universal Pokémon Randomizer ZX was released. The UPR ZX is a significant branch that emerged from the original UPR, developed by Ajarmar with significant contributions from darkeye and cleartonic. It added a slew of new features and rebalancing, with the most notable perhaps being support for the 3DS games (Gen 6 & 7). Despite its popularity, the development of the ZX branch eventually ceased. The last update was released February 12, 2023, marking the end of an era.

August 6, 2022, voliol released the first version of a nameless branch, later “UPR ZX V branch”. This branch had some focus on graphical features, and also contained considerable refactoring. Initially, the branch was based off brentspector’s branch, but later “moved” to ZX.

Dec 1, 2023, foxoftheasterisk began work on a branch focused on adding features to control the randomization, called “Closer To Vanilla”. Although it was originally intended to implement features to be added to the ZX branch rather than have its own releases, she eventually released a single version on May 17, 2024.

July 11, 2024, collaboration between foxoftheasterisk and voliol led to a release of their branches merged (and then some): the Universal Pokémon Randomizer FVX.