Most Game Boy owners in 1996 used the link cable to fight each other, at Tetris or anything else with a two-player mode. Satoshi Tajiri had a different use in mind. “I thought of actual living organisms moving back and forth across the cable,” he told TIME in 1999. “The idea I had was for information to go back and forth. It wasn’t about competition.” His company, Game Freak, built a role-playing game around that idea and sold it on two cartridges. Each held a slightly different set of monsters, so nobody could catch them all without a friend with the other version and a cable.
The games came out in Japan with little fuss, as Pocket Monsters Red and Green, on 27 February 1996. Within two years Nintendo Power was telling American readers that “practically no one in Japan, young or old, has been safe from their ferocious charm.”
Fast facts
- Developer: Game Freak, led by Satoshi Tajiri.
- Publisher: Nintendo; the copyright is shared by Nintendo, Creatures and Game Freak.
- Released: Red and Green, Japan, 27 February 1996; Blue, Japan, 15 October 1996; Red and Blue, United States, end of September 1998; Britain, October 1999.
- Platform: Game Boy, on a 4-megabit cartridge with battery-backed memory for saved games.
- Monsters: 150 to collect, plus a hidden 151st, Mew.
- Sales: over eight million in Japan by 1998 (Nintendo Power); 10.23 million in Japan by 2006 (Retro Gamer).
Catch, train, trade
The player is a boy from a small town who is given a first monster by Professor Oak and sets out to become a Pokémon Master. Wild Pokémon hide in long grass, caves and water. To catch one, the player’s own Pokémon has to wear it down in a fight before the player throws a ball to trap it. Every species caught or seen goes into a log that the cartridge’s battery keeps.
The route across the region of Kanto runs through towns with Gym Leaders to beat, each giving up a badge; with enough badges, the player can challenge the Elite Four at Indigo Plateau. Team Rocket, a gang of thieves, gets in the way. Battles are turn by turn and depend on types. As Computer and Video Games put it, water types “are good at soaking the fire-type” but struggle against electric types. Nobody dies. A beaten Pokémon faints, and a visit to a Pokémon Centre revives it.
Retro Gamer found one flaw in the balance: the psychic-type monsters were too strong, until Gold and Silver added a new Dark type to answer them. Tajiri compared link-cable battles to martial arts: “It’s like karate: two players compete, they bow to each other. It’s the Japanese concept of respect.”
Red, Green and Blue
The two versions were the same game with a different mix of monsters. Nintendo Power’s preview of 1998 explained that each cartridge let a player collect only about 140 of the 150, “to get the rest, you’ll need to wheel and deal”. A monster common in one version might be rare in the other. Some would not evolve into their final form at all unless they had been traded to another cartridge.
Japan got a third version. Pocket Monsters Blue, which Nintendo dates to 15 October 1996, sold for ¥3,000 and did not reach ordinary shops until October 1999. It redrew the monsters in new poses and rewrote their log entries. Computer and Video Games listed it in its chart of the ten best-selling games in Japan in its January 1997 issue. Public accounts say it was first sold by mail order through the children’s comic CoroCoro Comic; Nintendo’s own page gives only the dates. The English-language games, released as Red and Blue, were built on this version.
One monster sat outside the count. Nintendo’s American adverts told players to “capture all 150”, but the game held a 151st, Mew. Computer and Video Games explained in 1999 that Mew was “impossible to get unless you attend a special event organised by Nintendo”.
Crossing the Pacific
At Nintendo’s Space World show in November 1997, Edge reported, Pocket Monsters had been the biggest-selling game of the year in Japan, ahead of Final Fantasy VII, and the best-selling Game Boy cartridge ever. It was not certain the games would travel. George Harrison of Nintendo of America told Edge that the company hoped to bring them to the US in late 1998, and that it would take “not only a large effort to translate the game itself” but bringing over “a TV show and all sorts of merchandising elements” as well. Satoru Iwata, then at HAL Laboratory, helped: Tsunekazu Ishihara later recalled that Iwata read through the Game Boy source code and helped decide how Red and Green would be localised.
Nintendo of America launched the games like a military campaign. In September 1998 Nintendo Power quoted Gail Tilden, “Supreme Commander of Pokémon forces in North America”: the “invasion” would begin in Topeka, Kansas, on 27 August, with ten Volkswagen Beetles painted as Pikachu, and the animated series would start on television on 7 September, ahead of the games at the end of the month. “It takes courage, dedication and a lot of Game Boy hours to capture all 150 Pokémon,” Tilden said.
Nintendo Power’s own reviewers were cautious. One thought “serious role players may want to look elsewhere”; another promised “lots of replay value”.
In Britain
British players waited another year, until October 1999. Computer and Video Games put it “right up there with Half-Life, Goldeneye, and Gran Turismo as one of the greatest games ever”. A cartridge cost £24.99. The same issue warned that pirated Pokémon toys and cards were already arriving, and quoted Clive Hill of 4Kids Entertainment, Nintendo’s licensing agent in Britain: “There’s little official Pokémon merchandise this year.”
Sales and after
By the spring of 1998 Nintendo Power put the Japanese game’s sales at over eight million, with more than 600 Pokémon products in Japanese shops, from music CDs to snack food. Retro Gamer later counted 10.23 million Japanese sales for Red and Green, which beat the country’s previous record, held by Super Mario Bros., by almost four million. Worldwide, Guinness World Records cited VGChartz’s estimate of 31.37 million copies in 2017, and called the games the best-selling ever that had not been bundled with a console.
The games started a series. Pokémon Gold and Silver followed in Japan in November 1999. Pokémon Stadium on the Nintendo 64 took their battles into 3D, and FireRed and LeafGreen remade the originals for the Game Boy Advance. On 27 February 2016, twenty years to the day after Red and Green, Nintendo put Red, Blue and Yellow on the Nintendo 3DS download store, with local wireless in place of the link cable. See Pokémon for the series and the Pokémon phenomenon for the craze that followed.
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 33, 2006, pp. 44–49, Pokémon Red and Blue feature: the Japanese release date; the American and European releases; the story, Gym Leaders, Elite Four, Team Rocket, types, fainting and Pokémon Centres; the psychic types; Tajiri’s karate comparison; 10.23 million sales in Japan and the Super Mario Bros. record; Gold and Silver and the Dark type, Stadium, FireRed and LeafGreen.
- “The Ultimate Game Freak”, TIME Asia, 22 November 1999 (web, secondary): Tajiri on the link cable, quoted also in Retro Gamer issue 33. https://time.com/archive/6951818/the-ultimate-game-freak/
- Nintendo Power issue 108, May 1998, Pokémon preview feature: Japan “overrun by monsters”, over 600 products, over eight million sold, catching, the monster log, about 140 of 150 in each version, evolution by trading, the animated series.
- Nintendo Power issue 112, September 1998, p. 106: Gail Tilden and the “invasion” from Topeka, the Pikachu Beetles, the television series from 7 September and the games at the end of September.
- Nintendo Power issue 113, October 1998, p. 112: review (4 megabits, battery-backed memory, 150 Pokémon, trading by Game Link; the reviewers’ comments); adverts with the Nintendo, Creatures and Game Freak copyright line.
- Nintendo Power issue 114, November 1998: advert, “capture all 150 of them” and “use your Game Boy link cable and hook up with a friend”.
- Edge issue 54, January 1998, news: Space World ’97 report (the biggest-selling game of 1997 in Japan and best-selling Game Boy cartridge; George Harrison on the American release).
- Nintendo Co., Ltd., Pocket Monsters Blue product page (web, in Japanese): release on 15 October 1996, general retail from 10 October 1999, ¥3,000, redrawn pictures and new log text. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/n02/dmg/apej/index.html
- Computer and Video Games issue 182, January 1997, p. 102: Japanese top ten, including Pocket Monster Blue.
- Public accounts of Blue‘s mail-order release through CoroCoro Comic, and of the English games’ basis in it: Wikipedia, “Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow” (web, secondary). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Red,_Blue,_and_Yellow
- Computer and Video Games issue 216, November 1999, p. 40 (the release at the end of October; pirated merchandise; Clive Hill) and pp. 104–105 (review: Mew, £24.99, water, fire and electric types, the comparison with Half-Life, Goldeneye and Gran Turismo).
- Planet Game Boy issue 1, September 1999: British release “some time in October”.
- Nintendo, Iwata Asks: Pokémon HeartGold Version & SoulSilver Version (2009–10, web), as transcribed by PocketMonsters.Net (secondary): Ishihara on Iwata, the source code and the localisation. https://www.pocketmonsters.net/Iwata_Asks_HGSS
- Guinness World Records, “Best-selling videogame (excluding bundle sales)”, record dated 28 November 2017 (web, secondary), citing VGChartz. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/best-selling-video-game-(excluding-bundle-sales)
- The Pokémon Company, corporate history (web): the February 1996 release; Gold and Silver in Japan in November 1999. https://corporate.pokemon.co.jp/en/aboutus/history/
- “Pokémon Red, Blue & Yellow Are Coming To The 3DS Virtual Console on 27th February, 2016”, Nintendo Life, November 2015 (web, secondary), and Siliconera, 12 November 2015 (web, secondary): the 3DS release and local wireless trading. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2015/11/pokemon_red_blue_and_yellow_are_coming_to_the_3ds_virtual_console_on_27th_february_2016