Pokémon turns 30 this year. To celebrate, we invited the Flat community to compose original music for the world of Pokémon — new regions, rival themes, legendary creatures, trainer adventures. The response was unlike anything we expected.
Composers from around the world sent in battle themes, town themes, atmospheric landscapes, and deeply personal pieces about what this franchise has meant to them across their lives. Every submission was reviewed individually before judging. Below are the Top 10 that stood out — thank you to everyone who composed this month.
A note on the Top 10
Every valid submission received a full review from our team. The ten pieces below rose to the top of that process. No two sound alike — no two composers interpreted the Pokémon theme the same way. That variety is, we think, exactly what this universe has always celebrated.
🥇 1st Place: The Day We Reunited with Pokémon
by Euphonist and pianist
This piece didn't represent a region or a battle. It represented something more elusive and more honest: the feeling of growing up, setting down something you loved, and then — years later — hearing a familiar Pokémon melody drift through a room and feeling it all come back.
The composer describes imagining "someone gently revisiting fragments of the past, recalling them one by one, as if uncovering a precious legacy left behind in childhood." Familiar Pokémon themes appear throughout, transformed — slightly different from how you remember them, because memory itself transforms what we love. The solo euphonium carries the piece with a warmth that sits exactly at the register of nostalgia: full and vulnerable at the same time. The harmonic arc passes through four key centers, the alternating time signatures create a halting, searching quality like trying to remember something that keeps slipping away, and the micro-tempo variations at the close feel less like notation and more like a human heart.
This is not a young composer showing off. This is a composer with something to say, using every tool available to say it. After the final note, neither of us spoke for a moment. That's everything.
🥈 2nd Place: The Rising Sunne — Solgaleo and The Sands of Time
by Camden Bradley
Camden wrote a complete short story in music. A traveler lost in a scorching desert stumbles upon an ancient temple half-buried in sand. Inside, Solgaleo — the celestial lion, guardian of light — awakens. What began as a search for shelter becomes a battle for survival beneath the blazing power of a legendary Pokémon.
Every compositional choice maps onto this narrative with precision. The hushed opening evokes the desert's crushing stillness. An explosive shift into a jagged, unstable meter marks the moment the traveler steps inside and the air changes. Seventeen instruments across 71 measures: an oud brings desert timbral color, nagado taiko drums drive the encounter's ferocity, choir tenor adds spiritual weight, and a glockenspiel shimmers throughout like Solgaleo's gathering radiance. The piece ends not in triumph but in whispered stillness — as if both traveler and creature have been changed. The world this piece builds lingers after the final note.
🥉 3rd Place: Aurelia's Fight
by Matteo Samperi
Matteo built an entire Pokémon region before writing a single note. Aurelia is inspired by Italy — volcanic coasts, crystalline water, cities built from white marble — and "Aurelia's Fight" is the music for its League championship battle. The opening introduces the fight in minor, the intensity builds, a variation signals near-defeat, and then a miraculous revive brings a triumphant new theme before a majestic coda resolves like a champion's trophy being raised.
What makes this piece exceptional is its use of metric complexity not as display but as drama. A sequence of time signature changes in the climactic section creates genuine turbulence — you can feel the battle spinning out of control. The dynamic range maps every emotional turn from quiet tension to thunderous apex to a final, dignified resolution. Aurelia is a region we'd love to visit.
4th Place: A Wild Rival Appears
by Brady Duplex
The best Pokémon rivals aren't villains — they're mirrors. Brady understood this completely. The piece opens at breakneck speed, all swagger and upward momentum. Then the meter shifts and the dynamic drops to a quiet hush: a glimpse of the person beneath the bravado, uncertain and briefly exposed. The energy rebuilds, and the final climax closes like a last charge. That arc — confidence, doubt, re-commitment — is the narrative grammar of every great Pokémon rival. Sixteen instruments, including crunch guitar, xylophone, and full strings and brass, handle the drama with genuine flair.
5th Place: Rose Wood Town
by Braxton X. C.
Braxton wrote a Canadian countryside starting town — peaceful, tree-lined, the kind of place where Pokémon adventures begin before the world opens up — and made one choice that set this piece apart from everything else: 7/8. Not 4/4. Seven beats per measure, giving the piece a lilt that feels slightly sideways, slightly unusual. Exactly like a Pokémon starting town should feel. The folk ensemble of tin whistle, harmonica, acoustic guitar, ukulele, violins, and flute is warm and utterly charming. Coming out of a composer's block, this is a stunning piece of atmospheric writing. You can almost smell the cedar trees.
6th Place: Perfect Order
by Rylan Brown
Rylan wrote a piece about Zygarde — the Pokémon guardian of ecological equilibrium — and made one decision that announced the concept before a single note: every synth layer is named after a letter of Z-Y-G-A-R-D-E. The instrumentation itself is world-building. The music moves with a hypnotic, cycling inevitability that feels like a biological rhythm that cannot be interrupted. Cold, methodical, and vast — this sounds like something ancient watching from the shadows of a cave. The modulation near the end lands with the quiet finality of equilibrium restored.
7th Place: The Zephyr Trail
by Harry Smithey
Harry mapped a Pokémon trainer's ascent onto 37 measures: shimmering piano for crystalline mountain air, a bouncy flute melody for the Route's first steps, a trumpet entry for the heroic climb, a sudden drop to near-silence for a legendary's domain, and a full ensemble finale for the summit. Five stages, just over one minute, complete. The quiet section in the middle is the piece's defining moment — genuine stillness after sustained energy, the musical equivalent of entering a place where something enormous is present but not yet seen.
8th Place: "Battle!"
by Ashton J.
Piano, contrabass, and drum set: the chamber music of Pokémon battles. Ashton's trio strips the battle theme down to its emotional skeleton. The piece opens with explosive conviction, descends through a moment of genuine vulnerability — the trainer looking at their last Pokémon and not knowing if it's enough — before the tempo surges and the finale delivers the payoff. Three acts, three tempos, one truthful arc.
9th Place: The Zurta Region
by IndieDevThrenody
When IndieDevThrenody was young, their siblings tried to make their own Pokémon game — inventing the Zurta Region, designing Pokémon, drawing maps — before eventually giving up. This piece is the theme that never got to be written for that game. Piano, ukulele, classical guitar, finger snaps, and hand claps combine into something bouncy and genuinely warm — music that sounds like children playing together in a room. The Zurta Region deserved to get made.
10th Place: Wind and Waves
by Ryan Bianconi
Flute for wind, harp for waves, piano for the harmonic tidewater beneath. Ryan's instrumentation tells the story before a note sounds. Built on a pentatonic melody over a Dorian harmony, "Wind and Waves" achieves three minutes of genuine elegance. A modulation away and back, a round section that emerged as a happy accident and was kept for exactly the right reasons, and a closing cadence that fulfills a harmonic promise made in the opening bars. The final quiet note feels like the tide pulling back.
Until the next challenge
Thirty years of Pokémon gave composers a universe rich enough to explore from dozens of directions — nostalgia and spectacle, stillness and ferocity, folklore and frontier. A solo euphonium can hold thirty years of feeling. An oud and taiko drums can conjure a desert temple. Seven beats per measure can sound like a countryside where adventures begin.
Thank you to everyone who composed this month. Whether you made the top 10 or not, your piece was heard, and it mattered. Check out the March 2026 challenge results if you missed them, and keep an eye out for the next theme announcement.
Ready to compose your own Pokémon theme — or start writing music for any world you can imagine? Try Flat free, directly in your browser, no download needed.
Until the next challenge — keep composing.