I.
Manga, I was told, is a kind of portable television: it occupies, pleasantly enough, the brain while one is doing something else — sitting, standing, waiting.
Donald Richie, “Walkman, Manga and Society”
Decades before the current smartphone epidemic, another handheld electronic device distracted millions of people across the globe from work, education, and interpersonal relationships: the Nintendo Game Boy. First released in 1989 (April in Japan, July in North America), the Game Boy represents an important moment in the commercialization of leisure: video gaming’s further conquest of daily life, the culmination of a process that began decades earlier.
Between the development of Spacewar! (1962) and other pioneering games in the early 1960s and the first commercial arcade games in the early 1970s, only a miniscule audience could play video games of any kind: science students at MIT, Stanford, Caltech and other universities with mainframe computers. The average consumer had no access to or indeed knowledge of video games except on the off chance that he or she happened to know someone at one of a handful of early computer science departments. Computer Space (1971), Pong (1972) and other early arcade games represented a sea change, the transformation of gaming from an experiment or hobby into a business.
Jumping forward a few years, someone looking to play Breakout or Space Invaders in the 1970s had to deal with a number of limitations unknown to today’s gamers, most obviously the necessity of finding a physical arcade game at a local arcade, bar, pizzeria, bowling alley or movie theater. Once at that brick-and-mortar location, multiple factors limited the player’s time with any particular game: his or her supply of quarters; his or her skill level, which determined how long each quarter lasted; the need to wait in line for one’s turn with a particularly popular game; the business’s hours. Furthermore, any individual player’s selection of games to play was completely dependent on the choices of local business owners. If I own a modern console, I can buy any game for the system and play it as much as I want; 40 years ago, I could have only played Pac-Man (1980) if someone near me had chosen to buy, install and operate the game.
The mainstream popularity of home video game consoles — led by the Atari VCS/2600 before the crash and the Nintendo Entertainment System after it — greatly expanded choice and convenience. One could potentially spend all night bingeing video games without being sent home by an arcade manager at closing time. One could build a library of favorite games and play them over and over without ever leaving the house. Nonetheless, video gaming was still limited to a specific location, usually a den or living room with a console plugged into a television.
The Game Boy, on the other hand, turned not only every hour of every day but potentially every single physical location into a gaming experience. In less than thirty years, video games had gone from an experiment in a handful of university computer labs to ubiquity, omnipresence, anywhere and everywhere.
While I haven’t uncovered any firsthand evidence for this, I have to think that the name ‘Game Boy’ is a play on the name of another globally popular electronic device, the Sony Walkman. First sold in 1979, this portable cassette player sold 200 million units across the world and begat mp3 players, iPods and, eventually, today’s smartphones.
I began this section with a quote from a 1985 Donald Richie essay analyzing manga and the Walkman’s skyrocketing popularity in its broader Japanese sociocultural context. This essay, written well before I was born, offers an at times disturbingly prescient analysis of a society undergoing something very much like our current smartphone addiction. “Manga is to the eyes as Walkman is to the ears,” he writes.
The manga offers an absolutely inconsequential visual world which excludes and is preferable to the real one. The Walkman offers an aural world of equal inconsequentiality which veils both cacophony and stillness.
Noting that eighties Japan had less of an illegal drug problem than the western world, Richie ponders whether young Japanese people — “mouths closed, eyes preoccupied, ears plugged” — had simply chosen a different drug of choice. 37 years later, this addiction to constant artificial stimulation has become a global problem, and one can encounter what Richie calls “audio-visual dropouts” by just walking out the front door and visiting the nearest park, cafe or shopping center. Our world, in which every minute can be filled with media consumption, is a world shaped by the Walkman and Game Boy. (Would millennials be such compulsive smartphone users if we hadn’t grown up with Game Boys in hand?)
II.
Game Boy is the most perfect example in the industry that you can’t be sure about anything… anytime that someone shows me something that I have doubts about, I remind myself that I had doubts about Game Boy, too.
Don Thomas, former customer service and marketing director, Atari. Quoted in The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steven L. Kent.
First released in Japan in April 1989, the Game Boy launched with only four available titles and the ability to display only four colors: not a true grayscale, but shades of what gamers have unflatteringly called ‘spinach green.’ It was not the first portable video game system — Nintendo itself had previously released the Game & Watch series in the early eighties — and would soon be joined by major competition such as the Atari Lynx (September 1989) and Sega Game Gear (1990). Both of these systems offered much more complex games on a backlit color LCD screen. The Game Boy, on the other hand, lacked a backlight and used cheap, already outdated hardware in accordance with the late Gunpei Yokoi’s design ethos of “lateral thinking with withered technology” (sometimes translated as “lateral thinking with wilted technology”).
The Game Boy prevailed over its more advanced competitors for two main reasons. First, it was much cheaper. A Game Boy cost $89.99 at launch, compared to $149.99 for a Game Gear and $179.99 for a Lynx. Furthermore, both the Game Gear and Lynx were notorious drainers of batteries, whereas the not-backlit Game Boy offered a much longer battery life and thus extra savings.
Second, the Game Boy had a significant advantage in games despite its technical limitations. While I cannot name a single Lynx game off the top of my head, or a Game Gear game not starring Sonic the Hedgehog, the Game Boy came bundled with one of gaming’s deadliest killer apps, perhaps the platonic ideal of the ‘pick up and play’ game: Tetris. Fueled by the popularity of Tetris and Super Mario Land (1989), the Game Boy became an instant success in both Japan and North America, selling millions of units in both markets by the end of 1989. Nintendo continued to support the system with adaptations of its hit console games; Mario, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, Link and Samus all starred on the Game Boy’s 2.6” screen.
By 1992, the Game Boy had sold 25 million units in the United States alone. This huge, international user base of course attracted the attention of game developers, including Game Freak.
III.
It was initially conceived as a game that would be developed for this new hardware. Then there were substantial delays in completing the title.
Tzunekazu Ishihara, President and CEO, The Pokémon Company
According to Satoshi Tajiri, the idea for Pokémon “clicked” when he saw Nintendo’s newly released Game Boy in 1989:
It was a profound image to me. It has a communication cable. In Tetris, its first game, the cable transmitted information about moving blocks. That cable really got me interested. I thought of actual living organisms moving back and forth across the cable.
The game would be, as Tajiri later described it, all the favorite activities of his childhood “rolled into one.” It would involve exploring nature and discovering and capturing fantastical creatures the way he caught bugs and tadpoles; its world would take influence from his favorite manga, movies and tv shows, especially Godzilla and Ultraman.
The Game Boy’s portability in particular made it the perfect fit for a game that would evoke Tajiri’s memories of a less stressful time. “Places to catch insects are rare because of urbanization,” he told Time in 1999. “Kids play inside their homes now.” Tajiri ends his interview by placing Pokémon on Game Boy in the context of a fast-paced, increasingly stressful world — “right now, there isn't much time for kids to relax. So I thought of games that could help kids fill in those five- or 10-minute gaps.”
This statement, which reflects Tajiri’s nostalgia for a rural Japan, also resonates with Richie’s essay “Walkman, Manga and Society.” Both manga and the Walkman, Richie argues, “are attractive for entirely negative reasons,” for how they drown out other stimuli. “And what is it that they so successfully exclude?” he asks himself.
Why, life itself. The others standing, sitting, squeezed; the urban crush and the urban clutter and clatter; rural emptiness, rural sprawl; an environment both packed and empty… however pathetic the results, an attempt is being made to find a more habitable place.
In a busy, noisy, overstimulating urban Japan, the Pokémon games would offer a chance to escape to more habitable place: a calm, idealized, undeveloped Japanese countryside. (Or, more cynically, perhaps a highly commercialized leisure activity-product: an embellished electronic bug catching simulation instead of the increasingly rare real activity.) As portable games, they could offer this refuge anywhere.
Of course, Tajiri had no reason to limit his game idea to catching insects, so he pitched a larger idea to his key collaborators Ken Sugimori and Junichi Masuda. “Initially,” Sugimori recalled in a 2000 interview, “we talked about a game where you made kaiju fight each other.” (Kaiju literally means ‘strange beast’ and generally refers to giant monsters such as Godzilla and his various allies and enemies.)
Thus the game was beginning to take shape. It would be a Game Boy game about capturing, trading and battling monsters. Players could connect their Game Boys with a link cable in order to fight or trade.
Within the game’s universe, how would Game Freak explain the protagonist’s control over and ability to transport and trade these monsters? They could have perhaps drawn on fantasy genre tropes and made the player character a summoner able to conjure demons or elemental creatures. In Final Fantasy IV (1991), for instance, the summoner Rydia can call cockatrices, dragons, titans and other mythical creatures to assists the protagonists in battle.
Instead of magic, however, they drew on three key influences in order to provide a more science fiction explanation for the player’s control of monsters. In the Ultraman television series, a favorite of young Satoshi Tajiri, protagonist Dan Moroboshi uses capsules to store giant monsters, releasing them to fight enemy monsters. In Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball manga, which had become an anime by the time development began on Pokémon, Bulma’s father is the founder of the Capsule Corporation, whose main product is a line of high-tech capsules that allow customers to transport appliances, vehicles or even entire buildings in their pockets. (The world of Pokémon shares more than a little with that of Dragon Ball; both put futuristic technology in a paradoxically undeveloped, rural world whose wild spaces teem with fantastical animals.)
In addition to these fictional examples, real-life Japan abounds in gachapon vending machines that dispense toys encased in plastic capsules. First introduced in the 1960s, they were an established pop culture phenomenon by 1989. (And, of course, Pokémon themselves would inevitably show up in gachapon machines.) Perhaps the developers also saw a pleasing rhyme between the small handheld devices carried by the player character and the Game Boy carried by the player in the real world.
IV.
TIME: You really thought Nintendo would reject it?
Tajiri: Always. I was told they couldn’t really understand the concept of the game.
Satoshi Tajiri, 1999 Time interview
Game Freak pitched ‘Capsule Monsters’ to Nintendo in 1990 and received a muted response. “We were just kind of making it ourselves at first,” in the words of Junichi Masuda. “They said, ‘Oh okay, good luck. As long as you guys have money, keep working on it.’” As mentioned in the previous post, Game Freak subsidized Pokémon’s development by working on a variety of games for other publishers.
Nonetheless, Game Freak’s new project gained two powerful allies at Nintendo. Superstar designer Shigeru Miyamoto would join the project as a producer, acting as a mentor to the young game designers. Like Game Freak, Miyamoto would balance his work on Pokémon with other projects. He had quite a busy schedule between 1990 and Pokémon’s release in 1996: producing, among other games, Super Mario World (1990), The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991), Super Mario Kart (1992), The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (1993), Kirby’s Dream Course (1994) and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island (1995); designing and producing Star Fox (1993) and Star Fox 64 (1997); directing and producing Super Mario 64 (1996).
Miyamoto did find the time to make several significant contributions to Pokémon, such as suggesting that the game’s creatures should be split between two cartridges. “I’d memorize every piece of advice he gave,” Tajiri would later tell interviewers. “Since I was a teenager, playing Donkey Kong, he’s always been my role model. He’s a mentor for my heart.” Tajiri, who named the series’ protagonist after himself (‘Ash’ is ‘Satoshi’ in the original Japanese anime), named the player’s rival after Miyamoto; In his words, “Shigeru is always a little bit ahead of Satoshi” in both the games and anime.
Fellow Pokémon producer Tsunekazu Ishihara had known Tajiri since his Game Freak magazine days, when Ishihara considered producing a show about video games as a way to break into television. “I asked myself, ‘Who knows about Japanese video games more than anyone?’ And that’s where Tajiri came in,” he recalled in a 2000 interview. (“Back in those days,” Tajiri added, “there weren’t many adults willing to listen to me talk about video games.”) Ishihara would go on to break into the video game industry before Tajiri and Game Freak, getting his first game credit in 1987. During Pokémon’s development he produced two other Game Freak games, Yoshi (1990) and Mario & Wario (1993), and worked on a number of other Nintendo projects, including Earthbound (1994) and Mario’s Picross (1995). His greatest contributions to Pokémon would come after the first games’ release in 1996; Ishihara spearheaded the creation of the Pokémon Trading Card Game and played a leading role in the first wave of merchandising. He helped establish the Pokémon Company in 2000 and remains its president and CEO.
Backed by Miyamoto and Ishihara, if not by other Nintendo higher-ups, Game Freak continued their part-time development of ‘Capsule Monsters,’ which they renamed Pocket Monsters. Besides the two producers, the team was led by the trio of Satoshi Tajiri (director, designer and writer), Ken Sugimori (artist and creature designer) and Junichi Masuda (sound designer, composer and programmer). Other major contributors included programmer Shigeki Morimoto, who remains with Game Freak and has since become a Pokémon series director and designer, and creature designers Atsuko Nishida and Koji Nishino.
“We figured we could probably make a Game Boy game in about six months,” Ishihara would later recall; the games’ development would actually take six years.
V.
We wanted to break away from the standard format of fantasy RPGs from the very beginning. Instead of a hero defeating an evil villain, we decided a story about a kid traveling around to complete his Pokédex was more fitting for modern times.
Ken Sugimori, 2000 interview
What genre would Pocket Monsters be? The early Game Boy hits had had relatively simple gameplay: Tetris (1989) and Dr. Mario (1990) were single-screen puzzle games, as was Game Freak’s own Yoshi (1991); Super Mario Land (1989) was a stripped-down version of Mario’s NES platformers; Baseball (1989), Golf (1989) and Tennis (1989) were basic sports simulations adapted from six year-old NES launch titles.
1990, however, saw the release of Square’s The Final Fantasy Legend, which proved to Game Freak that an RPG could work on the Game Boy. They took inspiration and decided to make their game in the same genre.
Pokémon shares its basic gameplay with early JRPGs, especially the early Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games, incorporating many of the tropes that these games themselves took from Dungeons and Dragons. All three video game series share the same basic game mechanics such as hit points, turn-based battles and experience points, which accumulate and allow player characters to reach higher levels and learn new abilities. In both Pokémon Red and Blue and the first Final Fantasy the player character randomly encounters wild creatures in the undeveloped spaces between towns; heals the party at a special building in each town (inns and Pokémon Centers); uses potions to replenish hit points; uses antidotes to cure poisonings; uses ether and elixirs to replenish magic points/power points; uses special spells/attacks to poison, paralyze, confuse or sedate enemies; and uses elemental attacks to target enemies’ vulnerabilities (such as lighting attacks against water-aligned creatures).
Similarly, each of Pokémon Red and Blue’s Hidden Machines (HMs), which give individual Pokémon skills that can be used outside of battle, has a direct analogue in either Final Fantasy or The Legend of Zelda (1986). (While better described as an action-adventure game rather than a true RPG, Zelda would nonetheless significantly influence the JRPG genre.) Teaching a Pokémon Surf allows the player character to cross the water to previously inaccessible areas, just like the raft in Zelda and the canoe and pirate ship in Final Fantasy; Flash allows Pokémon to illuminate dark areas like the candles in Zelda; Strength allows Pokémon to move heavy rocks like the power bracelet in Zelda; Fly allows for instant travel between locations like the airship in Final Fantasy; Cut allows Pokémon to cut down inconvenient shrubs, which Link can do with his sword. These eventually overcome obstacles serve the same purpose in all three games: limiting the player to a certain area and then expanding their world at regular intervals.
Unlike its inspirations, Pocket Monsters would not take place in a Tolkien-via-Dungeons and Dragons medieval fantasy world, although a few traces of this world remain in the final games. As previously mentioned, the player can buy potions to heal their Pokémon; while card artists depict potions as modern-looking medical devices, the word itself indelibly evokes herbalism and witchcraft. Similarly, ‘elixir’ retains the flavor of alchemy. In Lavender Town’s haunted tower, the player can heal their Pokémon in a special area protected by what a character calls “white magic.” And, of course, Pokémon has dragons, unicorns and other creatures from the medieval bestiaries that inspired the fantasy genre.
These traces aside, the world of Pokémon would be very different. It would not star a mighty hero who would save the world and slay his enemies with swords or magic spells. Instead, the player character would be a Japanese boy that Satoshi Tajiri named after himself and described as “me when I was a kid.”
Early in production, the player character would actually fight alongside his Pokémon, presumably with weapons bought at stores and upgraded throughout the game. “We started to wonder, ‘If the protagonist can fight, what are the Pokémon for?’” Sugimori told Nintendo Online Magazine in 2000. Instead of fighting alongside his Pokémon, the player character and every other Pokémon trainer would be more like a coach or manager of a sports team, deciding on the best one to six creature lineup for each challenge, guiding each creature’s development into a formidable fighter and making in-battle tactical decisions such as substituting one Pokémon for another.
Pokémon would feature analogues of traditional RPG dungeons, such as the caves of Mt. Moon, Diglett’s Cave and the Seafoam Islands. These dungeons, while similar in design and gameplay mechanics to those in JRPGs, would fit differently into the Pokémon world. They would not be forbidden places, corrupted by black magic, haunted by hordes of demons, wizards and the undead. Instead, they would for the most part appear as natural spaces inhabited by an ecosystem of creatures. (The threat, in other words, comes from wild nature rather than the supernatural.) The watery, labyrinthine grottoes of the Seafoam Islands, for instance, includes random encounters with Pokémon versions of bats, crabs, seals, starfish, clams and seahorses.
Just as importantly, Pokémon’s dungeons, like every other location in the game, would take the place of and inspiration from real locations in Japan’s Kanto region. The real-life Seafoam Islands (actually a single island), Enoshima, is well known for its watery Iwaya Caves, one of which shelters an ancient Buddhist shrine. (A Hiroshige woodcut now in San Francisco depicts a pilgrimage to that shrine.) Similarly, the game’s very first dungeon or pseudo-dungeon, the bug-infested Viridian Forest, draws on a real-life counterpart, the wooded Oku-Chichibu mountain range, part of Chichibu-Tama-Kai National Park.
At the beginning of the Game Boy games, the protagonist leaves his bedroom, walks downstairs and sees Stand by Me (1986) playing on the family television. “Four boys are walking on railroad tracks,” the protagonist reflects. “I better go too.” This movie and its source material, Stephen King’s nostalgic coming-of-age novella “The Body” — part of the collection Different Seasons (1982) and completely lacking King’s usual supernatural horror — offer a better parallel to Game Freak’s original intentions for the Pokémon world than the epic wars between good and evil of the typical/stereotypical JRPG. (Pokémon game plots have become more grandiose over time.)
“We tried not to create anything that was too out of place or veer too much into fantasy,” in the words of Ken Sugimori. “I think a sense of being ground and of being an extension of the real world is important.” For Sugimori, the essence of Pokémon is “telling the tale of one young boy’s summer.”
VI.
Even if a video game doesn’t have the power to display very complex graphics, I believe your imagination has the power to transform that perhaps-unrecognizable sprite called a ‘rocket’ into an amazing, powerful, ‘real’ rocket.
Game Boy designer Gunpei Yokoi, 1997 interview
In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis contrasts the true artistic or literary experience, as he defines it, with two other media experiences, those of the ikon and toy. Unlike an ikon, which is intended to direct its viewer’s attention away from itself and towards the divine, the true work of art or literature demands constant attention to its details, a reception of the work as itself rather than as a springboard to something else.
Like the ikon, the toy exists to “stimulate and liberate certain activities,” in its case a child’s imaginative activity; in both cases, too much detail can impede the toy or ikon from serving its intended purpose. “It is often not the costliest and most lifelike toy that wins the child’s love,” Lewis writes. Instead, imagination has a tremendous ability to fill in blanks and overlook limitations. “The actual face of the teddy bear is invisible to an imaginative and warm-hearted child when it is absorbed in its play. It no longer notices that the eyes are only beads.”
This definition of the ‘toy experience,’ as opposed to what we might for this purpose call the aesthetic experience, is a useful way to view Pokémon’s development, not least because the Pokémon themselves would soon become toys. I’d argue and would not be alone in arguing that the enduring appeal of many early video game characters stems from their games’ virtuous technical limitations, which forced simple, iconic designs that players could imaginatively project upon. Consider Pocket Monsters producer Shigeru Miyamoto’s most famous creation. Mario looks the way he does because of the technical limitations of early-mid 1980s video games. A hat is easier to draw with a few pixels than a head of hair; a moustache prevents his face from looking like a featureless blob; overalls make his arm and leg movements easier to animate.
From the beginning, Game Freak knew that they would have to deal with significant technical limitations. The Game Boy itself was designed by a man whose mantra stressed creative use of outdated technology and who once told an interviewer that “I actually consider it more of a minus if the graphics are too realistic.” Pokémon Red and Green are both 512 KB, significantly smaller than any of the pictures used to illustrate this post. (You’ve sent larger word documents.)
With hindsight, lead creature designer Ken Sugimori recognized these limitations as a positive, not a negative:
We couldn’t use a lot of pixels to show all the details, and we couldn’t use many colors either, so we made sprites that were easy to understand and symbolized more complex designs. I think that’s why, as a result, Pokémon were so well-received by a wide range of people.
My mind again goes to early Disney. The black-and-white Mickey Mouse, as written by Walt Disney and drawn by Ub Iwerks, looks very little like an actual mouse and moves in ways that go against both the laws of physics and basic anatomy. Indeed, he exemplifies a 1920s-1930s animation style known as ‘rubber hose’ because of the rubbery flexibility and stretchiness of the characters’ limbs, which sometimes move more like tentacles than actual arms or legs with bones and muscles.
Compared to, say, the much more realistic characters of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) less than a decade later, this Mickey can downright simplistic, if not crude. Iwerks, an incredible and incredibly productive silent era-style animator, would not have been the right fit for the more visually and emotionally complex characters of Disney’s feature films; indeed, Iwerks returned to Disney in the 1940s not as a character animator but as a special effects technician. The old pie-eyed, white-faced Mickey was redesigned into his modern appearance for Fantasia (1940), which required more expressive eyes and facial features.
Nonetheless, the original Mickey Mouse was the version of the character that gained worldwide fame and laid the foundations of the Disney empire — a Mickey Mouse animated on a shoestring budget by a small but enthusiastic team. I would argue that both Mickey and Pikachu became worldwide images at least in part because, as Sugimori notes, technical limitations forced their creators to distill them into something with hieroglyphic simplicity, legibility and iconicity.
These limitations make the characters toylike in Lewis’ sense. While the commercialized leisure activity that is playing Pokémon Red and Blue lacks the exercise, fresh air and encounter with nature of a real walk in the countryside, the games’ limitations make them less numbing, less of an audio-visual drug than, say, a smartphone. The smartphone user can subject himself or herself to an unending audiovisual barrage, an endless playlist of YouTube videos, an infinite scroll through social media posts, a media binge whose immediacy can prevent subtler acts of reflection and imagination.
The player of Pokémon, on the other hand, has to make do with a few audiovisual hints, with raw materials for imaginative work. His or her imagination must build a bustling metropolis out of a dozen pixelated buildings on a tiny screen and must bridge the gap between a miniscule monochromatic sprite and the mythopoeic creature it represents. Gyarados (“huge and vicious… capable of destroying entire cities in a rage” according to the Pokédex), Machamp (“one arm alone can move mountains”) and Zapdos (“said to appear from clouds while dropping enormous lightning bolts”) are all 56 pixels by 56 pixels and take up postage stamp-sized piece of screen space. The teddy bear’s eyes are only beads.
VII.
Since the game was about getting monsters to fight, ‘collect and trade,’ having only tough-looking monsters wasn’t enough. After various considerations, it was decided that we needed cute monsters.
Ken Sugimori
Beginning with the idea of kaiju and inspiration from Godzilla characters, Sugimori started designing dinosaur-like reptiles, a few of which survived into the final game, such as Ryhorn, Nidoking and Lapras. From the beginning, the Game Freak developers sought to imagine not just monsters to fight but creatures that would each play their own role in the world, whether as wild or domesticated animals. For instance, I began the fifth part of this post with a Sugimori illustration showing a proto-Rhyhorn as a beast of burden. Similarly, Lapras was specifically designed as a creature that could transport humans across the seas.
As Sugimori mentions, these more prehistoric or monstrous-looking creatures would soon be joined by smaller, more kawaii teammates. These creatures too were created at least in part to fill a specific role within the Pokémon world, in this case that of small, cute animals that would serve as pets. Another consideration was that a game predicated on collecting and trading creatures would need to have creatures that would appeal to a variety of tastes, such as creatures so cute that some players would just have to add them to their collections. While Sugimori succeeded in his first attempt at designing a cute creature, Clefairy, he soon realized that he would need help designing a more diverse bestiary.
Thus Koji Nishino, already involved in the project as a planner, took on a second role that his coworkers only half-jokingly referred to as that of “cuteness supervisor.” Artist and designer Atsuko Nishida, who worked on Game Freak’s Sega Genesis/Mega Drive game Pulseman (1994), was brought on board to help design these cute creatures. While Tajiri and Sugimori are generally considered the creators of Pokémon, Nishida had an equally important role in shaping the multimedia series’ look and feel. Her greatest contribution is, of course, designing Pikachu, which I will discuss in the next post. (I’ve already examined a few of her other characters: Bulbasaur, Charmander, Charizard.) Other Pokémon designed by Nishida include Squirtle, Raichu, Oddish and its evolutions, Ponyta, Rapidash, Vaporeon, and Dratini and its evolutions. In other words, she designed almost all of the most popular first generation Pokémon, the ones that became the game’s mascots and the faces of the franchise.
While Nishida and Sugimori can each be identified as the designer of certain Pokémon, the majority of the original 151 were created through collaboration. In Sugimori’s words, Pokémon design involved “multiple people putting their ideas together and modifying the design to create a single character.” Because Game Freak had less than a dozen employees during Pokémon’s long development, each wore many hats, including that of character designer. “There just weren’t enough people,” Nishida told Pokemon.com in 2018, “so we’d help each other out.” Tajiri himself, for instance, designed or co-designed the Pokémon Poliwag, Poliwhirl and Poliwrath based on his childhood memories of catching tadpoles and being able to see their internal organs through their translucent skin.
In addition to cute and monstrous creatures, Game Freak filled out the Pokémon ecosystem with creatures very similar to common real-world animals such as bats, birds, caterpillars, rodents and jellyfish. The presence of these creatures, programmed to appear relatively often, would both make the Pokémon world more relatable and make the rarer, more mythic Pokémon look even more special by contrast.
As suggested by Miyamoto, Game Freak made two different but mostly identical versions of the game and divided a handful of Pokémon between each version in order to encourage trading with other players. (Or, more cynically, to encourage buying both versions.) A player of Red, for example, could not encounter a Vulpix or Meowth in the wild and would have to acquire it from the Green version. Four Pokémon — Kadabra, Machoke, Graveler and Haunter — could only evolve after being traded, providing another incentive. Furthermore, the player would have to make either/or choices at a few points during the game, such as choosing a starter or choosing which Pokémon to evolve Eevee into. Again, the only way to acquire these choices not taken would be via trade.
Game Freak created as many as 300 creatures for the games, with the number severely cut due to space constraints. (Several of these cut Pokémon showed up in later games, such as the reindeer-like Stantler, who first appears in Gold and Silver.) This selection process itself was a collaborative effort, with Game Freak staff members voting on which Pokémon would make the final cut.
They ended up with 150 and, with a small amount of extra space, decided to add one more secret character, Mew. This turned out to be an excellent decision, as speculation about this unavailable character became an important part of the first wave of Pokémania in its native Japan.
VIII.
It wasn’t always a smooth development.
Junichi Masuda
Game Freak’s inexperience and lack of resources almost killed Pokémon before the first games were ever released. In a 2018 interview with Polygon, Junichi Masuda recalled a computer crash that seemed to have deleted all of the games’ data, data that had not been backed up onto other computers. In his words, “it really felt like, ‘Oh my God, if we can’t recover the data, we’re finished.’” He tried everything he could think of, including asking for advice on an embryonic internet. After several failures the team finally succeeded in recovering what would become the first two Pokémon games.
The inexperience and disorganization that once jeopardized the entire project also led to a lack of polish in the final games. Pokémon Red and Blue are notoriously buggy. If you’re around my age, and grew up playing the games and reading strategy guides, you likely remember some of the more famous glitches, such as MISSINGNO., infinite rare candies and ‘Glitch City’ on Cinnabar Island.
Beyond these glitches, which would normally only be triggered by a player looking for them, the first Pokémon games abound in minor errors that affect gameplay. A number of Pokémon, including Beedrill, Mankey, Primeape and Scyther, can learn Focus Energy, an attack described as increasing the chance of a critical hit; due to a programming error, it actually decreases the chance of a critical hit. Both the manual and characters in the game describe psychic-type Pokémon as vulnerable to ghosts. Due to another error, they are actually immune to ghost-type attacks. Dragon-type Pokémon are intended to be weak to dragon-type attacks but this never plays out in the game because the only dragon-type attack, Dragon Rage, always does 40 points of damage regardless of elemental strengths or weaknesses.
If these games have unpolished, amateurish aspects, they are also amateurish in the best possible sense of that word — a labor of love rather than of financial gain. Indeed, much of the development occurred prior to any official contract with Nintendo, on Game Freak’s time and with their resources, after hours and in between official projects. Another Masuda anecdote illustrates just how small and casual this team was. “I was one of two programmers on the initial project,” he said in a 2018 interview.
We both were into techno music at the time. So we would be working late at night, it’d just be the two of us, and we would turn on this really heavy techno music — make it feel like it’s a club or something. We would just be programming late into the night doing that.
Those first games’ charm comes from this small, inexperienced but enthusiastic team, making Pokémon for the sheer joy of creating a new world and populating it with strange creatures.
IX.
In 1991, the Japan Foundation received 58,000 applications for its annual Japanese Language Proficiency Test, a figure that had increased 500% to 286,000 by 2002, over a period of just 11 years. The number of people studying the Japanese language, including those taking correspondence courses, is also expected to grow ten-fold to three million. Many of these three million, we can be certain, gained their interest in the Japanese language by watching Japanese anime when they were children.
Sugiura Tsutomu, “Japanese Culture on the World Stage”
Because of Game Freak’s commitment to other projects, the game’s part-time production stretched on beyond the Game Boy’s heyday. The years between Satoshi Tajiri’s flash of inspiration in 1989 and Pokémon’s eventual release in early 1996 saw console after console join an increasingly crowded market: SNES, Sega Game Gear and Sega Mega Drive/Genesis in 1990; Sega CD in 1991; Philips CD-i in 1992; 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, Atari Jaguar and Pioneer LaserActive in 1993; Sega Saturn, Neo Geo CD and PlayStation in 1994; Virtual Boy in 1995. While many of these systems failed, the successes among them made the Game Boy seem positively outdated by the time the first Pokémon games came out in 1996. Masuda would later recall industry friends and colleagues asking, “‘Really? You’re working on a Game Boy game? That’s not going to sell very well, don’t you think?’”
The games’ long development period also saw several developments that, in hindsight, helped pave the way for Pokémon’s international multimedia success, which began in the United States.
First and most obviously, anime became an increasingly mainstream part of American children’s television during the 1990s, most notably Sailor Moon beginning in 1995 and Dragon Ball Z beginning in 1996. Sailor Moon was broadcast in twenty different countries by 2004; Dragon Ball/Dragon Ball Z has been broadcast in at least thirty-six. (Cinematic anime also gained a higher profile in the 1990s, with Princess Mononoke (1997) breaking domestic box office records in Japan and receiving critical acclaim upon its 1999 United States release.) These shows’ success made American television stations more amenable to broadcasting Pokémon’s animated series a few years later.
At around the same time, another kawaii handheld virtual pet beat Pikachu to the North American market. Bandai’s Tamagotchi (tamago, ‘egg’ + uochi, the Japanization of ‘watch’) first appeared on Japanese store shelves in 1996 and came out in North America the next year, becoming in both places a phenomenon that in hindsight seems like a prelude to Pokémania and its backlash. Like Pokémon, Tamagotchi is a commercialized leisure activity aimed specifically at urban Japan, a portable pet that does not take up space or leave messes: a pet for busy commuters residing in cramped apartments.
“The principal at my son’s elementary school dispatched a memo banning them,” Andrew Ratner writes in a 1997 Baltimore Sun article titled “The Tamagotchi Generation.”
Some pupils got so despondent after their Tamagotchis died that they needed consoling, even care from the school nurse. Students in Connecticut reportedly stopped working on timed, standardized tests to dote on their beeping pets.
Tamagotchi's manufacturer intends to launch a national TV campaign in September for anyone still blissfully unaware. It plans a new model that can be ‘paused,’ so young people can still attend class.
Carol Lawson’s 1997 New York Times article “Love It, Feed It, Mourn It” includes a number of perspectives on the Tamagotchi fad, from a mother whose nine year-old son “cried hysterically and went crazy” upon the death of his Tamagotchi to psychologists Dr. Sylvia Rimm, who “can see the Tamagotchi as a teaching tool about pregnancy for young women and men” and Dr. Andrew Cohen, who refers to the Tamagotchi “mourning process” and describes it as “the most powerful product I’ve ever heard of, in terms of what it demands from a child.”
While I’m a bit too young to remember the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle’s prime years and have only vague memories of Pogs, I was a 1990s child-consumer and certainly had a Tamagotchi, Beanie Babies and Pokémon in many forms. I remember neighborhood kids dressing up as Power Rangers every Halloween and stories of adults buying dozens of MacDonald’s Happy Meals and throwing the burgers and fries away because they were only interested in the included Beanie Babies. (I also remember Furbies, which I never owned and which seemed and still seem more frightening than endearing to me.)
Pokémon, in other words, was in one sense merely the largest and longest-lasting children’s fad from a decade abounding with them. The 1990s saw a very porous boundary between disposable child’s gift and adult collectible/speculative investment. It took baseball cards, comic books and Disney memorabilia decades to cross this barrier; Beanie Babies and Pokémon cards did it almost instantly. Commentators at the time certainly saw Pokémon in this context. In their Time cover story “Beware of the Pokémania,” Howard Chua-Eoan and Tim Larimer write that “parents who have had to suffer through the games, TV series and shopping trips can take comfort in the fact that the Pokémon demographic is the same one that abandoned Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers.” (In hindsight this hope turned out to be greatly exaggerated. Even the Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers have appeared in big-budget Hollywood movies in the past decade.)
During the late eighties and early nineties, Console war enemies Nintendo and Sega both attempted to leverage successful video game series into multimedia, synergistic, Disneyesque brands. Mario and Luigi made their anime debuts in Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach! (1986), an hour-long animated film that has never received an international release. 1988 saw the first issue of Nintendo Power, a magazine that would last for 24 years and serve the same synergistic promotional role for Nintendo that Disney’s flagship television shows (Walt Disney Presents, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color) did during the 1950s and 1960s.
One month later, Mario appeared on American television screens in The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, voiced by former professional wrestler ‘Captain’ Lou Albano, who also played the character in live-action skits. (In an IGN review of this show, critic Mark Bozon calls it “the biggest offender among Nintendo’s many embarrassing moments,” with “little to no appeal to anyone aside from masochistic TV obsessives.”)
As the world’s most popular video game character — Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988) sold more than 17 million copies, Super Mario World (1990) came bundled with the Super Nintendo — Mario’s image began appearing on a plethora of merchandise. After The Wizard (1989), essentially a feature-length, theatrically released commercial for Super Mario Bros. 3 and Nintendo’s ill-fated Power Glove, Mario returned to theaters in Super Mario Bros. (1993), starring Bob Hoskins as Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi and Dennis Hopper as King Koopa. It flopped at the box office, grossing around $21 million on a $48 million budget, and gained such a notorious reputation that it scared Nintendo away from moviemaking for thirty years. (Mario, voiced by Chris Pratt, will face off against Bowser, voice by Jack Black, in a computer-animated movie next year.) The late Bob Hoskins himself described the movie as “a fuckin’ nightmare” and “the worst thing I ever did.”
On the other side of the console wars, Sega introduced their mascot Sonic the Hedgehog in 1991. Designed to appeal to the American market, Sonic was much more successful there than in his native country; Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992) sold more than 5 million copies in North America, compared to only 400,000 in Japan. Sega was quick to capitalize on the character’s popularity. In addition to the requisite toys, t-shirts and ice cream truck novelty bar, Sonic began appearing in an Archie Comics series in 1992 and two different animated shows the next year.
The multimedia presence and merchandising success of Sonic, Pac-Man — who had toys, a television series and a hit novelty song in the early 1980s — and especially Mario seemed to demonstrate that a video game could be the cornerstone of a successful brand, the way that Star Wars had expanded from one blockbuster movie into something larger and more lucrative. It also demonstrated that, despite all his videogame sales, Nintendo’s Italian plumber was perhaps not the best character for this role. Nonetheless, Nintendo continued to aspire towards Disneyesque synergy. “Disney’s been through it,” Nintendo of American vice president Peter Main told J.C. Herz in an interview for her 1997 book Joystick Nation. “We try and learn everything we can from publications, conversations, licensing arrangements which we've been involved with them on in the past. We look to them for learning."
I was certainly not privy to 1990s Nintendo boardroom discussions, but I have to wonder whether Nintendo’s support of and patience with Pokémon through its long development process stemmed from some early idea of its multimedia potential. (Most people, at least outside of Japan, first encountered Pokémon not as a videogame but as an animated television series or set of trading cards.)
Rooted in the postwar consumerization of leisure and a Japanese image industry that had already made Godzilla, Hell Kitty and Super Mario global icons, Pokémon was designed for the Nintendo Game Boy, a system that perhaps more than any other made gaming an inescapable part of everyday life. Its protracted development coincided with several broader cultural shifts that primed international audiences (and business partners) to not only accept but embrace something like Pokémon: the mainstreaming of anime on children’s television; an unprecedented targeting of children as a consumer market; the corporate quest to build a synergistic multimedia empire.
X.
TIME: Did the Nintendo people expect Pokémon to be such a big hit?
Tajiri: Not at first. They didn’t expect much from the game. Game Boy’s popularity was declining.
After a protracted development process, Game Freak finished Pocket Monsters Red and Green in October 1995, too late for a 1995 holiday season release. (‘Pocket Monsters’ became ‘Pokémon’ outside of Japan due to trademark conflict with the American Monster in My Pocket toy line, which spawned its own video and board games.) Producer Ishihara nonetheless saw significant potential, as he later recalled in an interview. “Of all the titles I had experience of, that I had played or worked on as a producer, this was of the very highest caliber.”
Instead of potentially being under the Christmas tree, the first Pokémon games would be released in February 1996; February is video gaming’s equivalent of Hollywood’s January dump month.
I had this feeling that perhaps we were going to miss the last train,” Ishihara would later recall. “After all, we’d dragged it out until the very end of the system’s lifespan.”
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A special thanks to Lava Cut Content for hosting translations of interviews with Game Freak developers.
And of course to my friend Scott Oatman for his illustration of Satoshi Tajiri’s flash of inspiration.