The Nuzlocke Challenge began in March 2010 with one bored college student, one copy of Pokémon Ruby, and two self-imposed rules.

The original run

Nick Franco — then a University of California, Santa Cruz student, later a screenwriter — was procrastinating on college work. To make a replay of Pokémon Ruby more interesting, he gave himself two extra rules:

  1. He could only capture the first Pokémon he encountered in each new area.
  2. If a Pokémon fainted, he would consider it dead and release it.

That’s the entire invention. No mod, no patch, no official mode — just two promises. Every Nuzlocke rule, clause and variant since then is an extension of those two sentences. (Full ruleset today: Nuzlocke rules.)

From playthrough to webcomic

Franco turned the run into a webcomic, Pokémon: Hard-Mode. According to Bulbapedia’s history section, he posted the comics to 4chan’s /v/ board, where they gained attention and inspired others to try the challenge themselves. The following month he launched a website for the comics and a forum where fans could chronicle their own runs.

That website — nuzlocke.com — is still online today (copyright notice 2010–2026), and the comic is still its centerpiece.

Where the name came from

Franco himself called these runs “Hard-Modes.” The name “Nuzlocke” was created by his readers: the comic featured a recurring Seedot/Nuzleaf character drawn with the face of John Locke from the TV series LOST. Fans fused Nuzleaf + Locke into “Nuzlocke,” and the fan-made name stuck — eventually becoming the only name anyone uses. More on the word itself: Nuzlocke meaning.

How the first Nuzlocke ended

Appropriately for a permadeath challenge, the original run ended in failure: Franco’s team was wiped out in the champion battle against Steven Stone. Screen Rant’s origin write-up and Bulbapedia’s trivia both record the loss — the very first Nuzlocke was a failed one, which says everything about the format’s difficulty.

What happened next

The idea spread far beyond the comic’s audience:

  • The month after the comics, Franco’s site and forum gave fans a place to log their own challenge runs.
  • The concept spread into written stories, animations and livestreams — culminating in mainstream moments like JaidenAnimations’ Nuzlocke videos, which alone have drawn tens of millions of views.
  • Franco continued the comic with runs of Pokémon FireRed and Pokémon White — the White series is still ongoing. Full comic history: the Nuzlocke comic.
  • The community formalized harder formats like Hardcore Nuzlocke and dozens of variants.

Sixteen years later, r/nuzlocke counts 150K+ members and the challenge is applied to every main-series Pokémon game — all tracing back to one Ruby playthrough in March 2010.

Sources