Pokémon Gold and Silver kept time. A clock inside the cartridge, kept running by its battery, tracked the real hour and day, and the game followed it: some Pokémon only came out at night, and some events happened only on certain days of the week. Edge’s columnist Steven Poole was struck by how tightly the game was tied to the real world. “Some species of monster are nocturnal,” he wrote in 2000, “so that you will only see them if you are playing after dark.” He called it “chronological totalitarianism”, and offered the cynical view that it was “a fiendishly clever way to turn the world’s children into sleep-deprived, schoolwork-shunning zombies”.
The games took far longer than planned. In the summer of 1997, with the first games selling in Japan, Nintendo Power reported that Nintendo planned to release “Gold and Silver versions of Pocket Monsters 2” that autumn. They came out in November 1999, and sold 3.3 million copies in Japan by the end of the year.
Fast facts
- Developer: Game Freak. Publisher: Nintendo.
- Released: Japan, November 1999; North America, October 2000; Europe, April 2001.
- Platform: Game Boy Color.
- Pokémon: 100 new species, 251 in all.
- New: a real-time clock, day and night, breeding, held items, the Dark and Steel types, a phone in the Pokégear.
- Sales: 3.3 million in Japan by December 1999.
Space World 1999
When Nintendo finally showed the games at its Space World show at the Makuhari Messe in August 1999, it gave them more than a quarter of the floor. Edge’s reporter counted 288 monitors running “Pocket Monsters Gold and Silver (essentially Pocket Monsters 2)”, and noted that to the untrained eye the new game “seemed to look absolutely the same as the original”. The crowds of children did not mind. In Britain at that moment, the first games were only just going on sale.
What changed
The world of Gold and Silver is Johto, a new region next to the first games’ Kanto, with its own eight Gym Leaders. The new monsters arrived alongside new rules. The Dark type, Retro Gamer explained, answered the over-strong Psychic Pokémon of Red and Blue. Pokémon could now hold items, and two of them left at the Day Care could produce an egg. Retro Gamer called the night-and-day cycle “inspired”, and the clock, it said in a list of the best Game Boy Color games, gave the games “a ‘real life’ quality missing from previous Pokémon titles”. The Pokégear added a phone, so that trainers the player had met could call with tips. And some wild Pokémon appeared, very rarely, in different colours.
Two Game Boy Colors could also swap Mystery Gifts through the console’s infrared port.
Back to Kanto
The biggest surprise came after the end. Once the player has beaten the Elite Four, the game opens up Kanto, the whole region of the first games, with its own eight Gym Leaders to beat. A player with all 16 badges can climb Mt. Silver, where the last opponent waiting at the top is Red, the hero of the first games.
How Game Freak fitted two regions into one Game Boy cartridge has its own popular story. Satoru Iwata, then at HAL Laboratory, helped Game Freak with its code: Tsunekazu Ishihara later remembered him writing “tools for compressing the Pokémon graphic code”. It is often said that Iwata’s compression made room for Kanto. A 2023 analysis of the games’ code, reported by Nintendo Life, found otherwise: his routine made the games faster rather than much smaller.
Abroad
The games reached America in October 2000. N64 Magazine reported in its Christmas issue that they were “storming off the shelves in the US”, and Edge counted 48 million copies of Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold and Silver sold worldwide by May 2001. They went on sale in Britain in April 2001. Nintendo’s Pokémon Stadium 2 on the Nintendo 64 let players load their Gold and Silver teams through the Transfer Pak and battle them in 3D.
Later versions
Pokémon Crystal followed, reworking the same adventure. In 2009 Game Freak remade the pair for the Nintendo DS as Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, which had sold more than 2.6 million copies in Japan by the end of that year, and in September 2017 the originals were re-released on the Nintendo 3DS download store.
Sources
- “Trigger Happy”, Steven Poole, Edge issue 90, November 2000, p. 24: the clock, nocturnal Pokémon, “chronological totalitarianism”.
- Nintendo Power issue 98, July 1997, p. 76: “Gold and Silver versions of Pocket Monsters 2” planned for Japan that autumn; 3.5 million Pocket Monsters cartridges sold.
- Edge issue 77, Autumn 1999: Space World 1999 report (Makuhari Messe, August; the delay, 288 monitors, a quarter of the floor, the November date, the first games just reaching the UK).
- Edge issue 81, February 2000, p. 81: 3.3 million sold in Japan by December 1999.
- Retro Gamer issue 33, 2006, p. 47: breeding, the night-and-day cycle, the Dark type and the Psychic types, the extra hundred Pokémon.
- Retro Gamer issue 24, 2006, p. 44: Game Boy Color top ten (the real-time clock, the phone, breeding).
- N64 Gamer issue 34, December 2000, p. 54: breeding in Gold and Silver.
- IGN Unplugged issue 7, October 2001, p. 131: Gold and Silver tips (shiny Pokémon, the red Gyarados, the Day Care).
- Nintendo Official Magazine issue 111, December 2001, p. 72: the Pokémon types table, including Dark and Steel.
- N64 Magazine issue 49, Christmas 2000, p. 23: Pokémon Stadium Gold/Silver (the games selling in the US; Crystal on the way).
- IGN Unplugged issue 1, April 2001, p. 25: review of Pokémon Stadium 2 (251 Pokémon; the Transfer Pak).
- Edge issue 97, May 2001: 48 million copies of the five games sold worldwide, according to Nintendo.
- Edge issue 98, June 2001: the British launch.
- Edge issue 209, Christmas 2009, p. 31: Japanese sales chart (HeartGold/SoulSilver, 2,671,528).
- Pan Docs (gbdev.io, web, secondary): the MBC3 cartridge controller’s battery-backed real-time clock; Mystery Gift over infrared between Game Boy Colors in Gold, Silver and Crystal. https://gbdev.io/pandocs/
- Nintendo, Iwata Asks: Pokémon HeartGold Version & SoulSilver Version (2009–10, web), as transcribed by PocketMonsters.Net (secondary): Ishihara on Iwata’s compression tools. https://www.pocketmonsters.net/Iwata_Asks_HGSS
- Ollie Reynolds, “New Details Emerge On Satoru Iwata’s Work On Pokémon Gold And Silver”, Nintendo Life, 9 October 2023 (web, secondary): the popular story and the 2023 analysis. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2023/10/new-details-emerge-on-satoru-iwatas-work-on-pokemon-gold-and-silver
- The Pokémon Company, corporate history (web): the Japanese release in November 1999. https://corporate.pokemon.co.jp/en/aboutus/history/
- Wikipedia, “Pokémon Gold and Silver” (web, secondary): release dates in Japan (21 November 1999), North America (15 October 2000) and Europe (6 April 2001); held items; Kanto, the 16 badges and Red at Mt. Silver; the 3DS re-release on 22 September 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Gold_and_Silver