It’s 1996, and young Richmond native Joseph Cannella is playing Pokémon Red on his grimy, well-loved Game Boy. Enchanted by the world-building, he wishes he could explore Richmond the same way he explores Pallet Town, the first area of the game. The simple overworld design and the chunky black-and-white pixels leave a lot to the imagination but perhaps that’s where the longing comes from.
It’s 2016, and Cannella is hunting for Bulbasaurs in the streets of Richmond while playing Pokémon Go. Like many players at the time, he appreciated the novelty of the “augmented reality” experience of playing Pokémon, but it still didn’t quite scratch the itch he and many other ’90s kids felt after playing the original Pokémon titles. The game was in the city, but he wanted the city to be in the game.
It’s 2025, and Cannella has shared his first game, Small Town RVA, to the r/rva subreddit HERE. Despite its rudimentary presentation, consisting mostly of stock visual assets and sound effects, the panoramic Richmond experience is there: eat some mushrooms to teleport to Rest in Pieces, where a witch will task you with plunging to the depths of James Monroe’s grave in Hollywood Cemetery to battle ghosts and find a crystal that will grant you access to other locales such as the Poe Museum, the Pump House, Pratt’s Castle, and many other familiar sites.
The game boasts an impressive number of features for a side hobby. Players can interact and chat with each other when they meet in the game. You may notice that the darker-colored paths match Richmond’s actual roadways. The game even includes a dynamic weather system that periodically checks NOAA data for Richmond’s weather, so if it’s raining outside your window, it will be raining in Small Town RVA too.
It didn’t take long for positive reviews, feedback, and strategy-sharing to populate the comments section of the Reddit post. Cannella has been pleasantly surprised by the reception to his ambitious hobby. “I wasn’t even sure if anybody was going to play it at all. I’m kind of surprised by the number of people that have checked it out.”
Cannella told me that the genesis of the game hearkens back to those early experiences playing Pokémon and The Legend of Zelda. “I was like, ‘It’d be cool to make a map that looks like a Game Boy version of the city,’ and I kept realizing more and more things I could add.” So far, there are around 13 points of interest that players can discover, but Cannella has a creative and collaborative strategy for adding even more.
“Let’s say you take a picture at Hollywood Cemetery, or even here, for instance,” he said, gesturing toward the entrance of Sidewalk Café, already surprisingly animated for four o’clock on a Monday. “If you upload that to your profile, the game will pull out the GPS data from that photo and place the image where it was taken on the in-game map.”
Cannella himself has uploaded most of the photos currently in the game, which players can find and collect as Polaroids scattered on the ground. Each photo features a comment section and credit to the player who submitted it.
He explained that another goal of this social media aspect is to encourage players to explore the city more. “Even in high school, I got into going to the river and bringing grills and stuff. To me, the parks here are a fantastic asset that I feel like is underutilized. If you know how to get to certain spots, you can have a really good time.”
He mentioned that he recently took his three-year-old son, who, Cannella added, sometimes acts as a sort of QA team by finding bugs he hadn’t noticed yet, tubing to an island in the river, where they built a fire and roasted marshmallows and hot dogs. “I’m hoping to have people get more exposure to the parks through the game.”
Cannella seems pretty jazzed by the engagement and has been quick to implement feedback as it comes in. A mini-map has been added, and per a recommendation from Reddit commenters, some of the sound effects have been toned down to be less “traumatic” when the player is attacked by bats. Even as I was writing this piece, he let me know that he added a blinking dot to indicate player position on the mini-map, an improvement we’d discussed during our chat.
Though he dabbles in other video game experiments, including one idea for a digital shooting range that would use a real BB gun, Cannella says his main priority right now is improving Small Town RVA. “I wanna focus on clearing out anything that’s confusing people, where they might drop off because they’re not sure what to do next.” Some other recommendations he’s shown interest in from the Reddit thread include random chicken bone encounters, opossums, and saving Francine from a delivery truck.
While he still wants to maintain creative control and pursue his vision for the game, Cannella admitted he’s not much of an artist. Should the right collaborators come along, he’d be open to working with pixel artists and musicians to enhance the game. Referring to one commenter who offered to sketch a replacement for the AI-generated logo, Cannella said, “I am kind of attached to the logo. I appreciate that feedback, but I just want to make sure it’s gonna fit the game well. I would hate to be like, ‘Yeah, that sounds great,’ and then walk it back later on.”
Going forward, Cannella hopes to add new features, levels, and quality-of-life improvements, as well as possibly develop a mobile app. He’s still a one-man team working on the game in his downtime, which, after recently welcoming a second child, he admits he doesn’t come by easily. “It’s just me working on it in my free time, whenever I can squirrel away between 10:30 and midnight maybe,” he laughed sort of sleepily.
You can play Small Town RVA at smalltownrva.com.
Follow Small Town RVA on Instagram HERE
Find the original Reddit post HERE
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