In order to obtain the bicycle in the original Pokemon Red & Blue, you either have to pay the bike guy 1 million yen (which works out to roughly $9,000 USD–a princely sum for a child’s bike) or hand over a bike voucher. Since your wallet can only contain 999,999 yen, the only real option is to travel to Vermillion City, join the Pokemon Fan Club, and then go all the way back to Cerulean City to grab a shiny new set of wheels.
Keeping with the game’s original theme, The Pokemon Company is hosting a contest (thank you, SiliconEra) to give away a real-life replica of the Red & Blue bicycle. Appropriately called the “1 million yen bicycle,” you can’t actually get the bike by forking over a million yen. The only way to get it is by retweeting the sweepstakes announcement and getting handed a voucher in a random draw.
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The biggest thing we should mention first is that the bike isn’t real. Well, it’s real, and it is life-size. but it’s just a model and not a real bicycle that you can ride around town. The contest is also only open to Japanese residents, so there’s not much point in us Westerners trying to grab this sweet ride.
Unlike the video game version's black and white pixels, the real-life Pokemon Bike is going to have a lot of cute aesthetic touches, such as tires with PokeBall designs and rims that feature icons of Pikachu, Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Squirtle. The ends of the handlebars will also feature a PokeBall design.
If you live in Japan and actually have space to display a non-functional bike, then follow the @Poke_Times Twitter account and retweet the sweepstakes announcement using the Japanese hashtag. It translates to "# Pokemon's 1 million yen bicycle," but use the Japanese characters if you're going to enter.
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