Twenty-two years after their Game Boy Advance debut, Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen have officially broken into the Pokemon franchise's all-time top 10 best-sellers, powered entirely by their recent Nintendo Switch ports.
Nintendo's fiscal year results for the period ending March 2026 confirm the Switch re-releases shifted over 4 million copies, pushing the duo's lifetime total to roughly 16 million units. That lands them at ninth place on the series' all-time sales chart, squeezed between Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire (16.2 million) and Pokemon Black and White (15.6 million). Joe Merrick from Serebii flagged the data on social media shortly after Nintendo published the financial report.
FireRed's iconic Charizard title screen
From GBA cult classic to modern chart contender
The original FireRed and LeafGreen launched in 2004 as full remakes of the 1996 Game Boy originals, dragging Kanto back to life with updated visuals, quality-of-life tweaks, and the Sevii Islands as a post-game reward. They moved 12 million copies during their initial GBA run, which was legitimately impressive at the time. The catch? Pokemon never stopped selling. As Sword and Shield, Scarlet and Violet, and the rest of the modern entries piled up tens of millions of sales, the GBA pair gradually dropped out of the top 10.
The Switch re-releases flipped that math overnight. Four million new copies in a matter of weeks isn't a slow burn — it's a proper surge. The key is that FireRed and LeafGreen were the only way to play a mainline Kanto remake on modern hardware, and a generation of players who either missed the GBA era or wanted to revisit it clearly showed up.
Where the numbers actually sit right now
Here's the full Pokemon franchise top 10 by lifetime sales, pulled from Nintendo's latest figures:
The gap between FireRed and LeafGreen and fifth place (Diamond and Pearl at 17.6 million) is only 1.6 million units. With the Switch ports still actively on sale and no sign of demand cooling, that top-five spot is genuinely within reach.
Pokemon's bigger picture in Nintendo's annual results
FireRed and LeafGreen weren't the only Pokemon story in the fiscal report. Pokemon Pokopia, the Switch 2 exclusive life-sim spin-off, cleared 4 million copies within five weeks of launch, making it one of the fastest-selling Pokemon spin-offs in the franchise's history.
Nintendo framed Pokopia's performance as proof of concept for its Switch 2 strategy, noting that the company aims to "convey the appeal of the platform to consumers who play on Nintendo Switch" by continuing to release compelling titles. What most players miss in that statement is the implication: more classic Pokemon re-releases on Switch hardware could follow the same playbook.
Kanto revisited on Switch
What this means for players heading back to Kanto
For anyone jumping into the Switch version fresh, the games hold up better than you might expect. The Kanto region's structure is tight, the rival battles still hit hard, and the Sevii Islands give you a proper reason to keep playing after the Elite Four.
If you're getting back into the swing of things, brushing up on the Eeveelution guide for Vaporeon, Jolteon, and Flareon is worth your time early, since Eevee decisions lock you into a specific path. The same goes for understanding how Pokemon Natures affect your team's stat growth, which our Natures guide for FireRed and LeafGreen covers in full.
With FireRed and LeafGreen now sitting less than 2 million sales behind the top five, and the Switch versions still selling, the next Nintendo financial report could tell a very different story about where Kanto's GBA remakes rank among the all-time greats.
