Today the franchise Pokemon he is an unstoppable behemoth. The future arrival of Pokémon Scarlet and Purple confirms the good health of the saga, but the beginnings were not always easy. In the 90s, with the birth of the first generation, Game Freak had to shape a title in a genre that they did not dominate.
Thanks to the investigative work carried out by the Did You Know Gaming? channel, various interviews with those responsible for Pokémon Red and Blue have been compiled. One of the craziest ideas the studio had to scrap was to include 65,535 different versions of the play.
The programmer Takenori Oota explained in his day that the intention was to generate a random ID number every time a cartridge was booted up for the first time on a Game Boy. Satoshi Tajiri, founder of Game Freak, confirmed this vision of the study by ensuring that even each Kanto would be different for each player.
The proposal was presented to Shigeru Miyamoto, who saw it with good eyes but with a problem. The person in charge of Nintendo thought that it would be difficult for the players to know about these differences between the games, so he supported that only two editions be created based on the colors. By the way, the high number is because the Game Boy couldn’t handle a higher number to work with without starting to slow down the program.
No battles between trainers
Shigeki Morimoto had it clear during the development of Pokémon. Fighting via the Link cable didn’t seem interesting to the team, limiting interaction with the attachment to creature trades. However, the Big N did not agree and demanded that battles be included.
Morimoto and the rest of the team were still unconvinced about this, so they first developed a battle format where nothing could be done. Basically, we would see the two Pokémon attack each other without the player being able to choose the commands, something that Nintendo did not love either. Finally, in the last stages of work, the system we know today was included.
Buy lettuce, meat and a Pokémon
If we go to Ciudad Azulona in the first generation, we can buy Pokémon like Abra, Porygon or Pinsir with the exchange of casino chips. It’s a special case, since we normally increase our team by catching Pokémon in the wild.
All in all, Game Freak focused the main mechanics initially towards the purchase of Pokémon. It would be common to have markets in each city where they could be purchased, but the idea was discarded since it would focus the player a lot on saving money and not so much on exploring to find Pokémon in the grass.
Also, each pokemon would have a specific valuewhich would further enhance the exchanges between players to get money.
No Pokémon and no life bar
Another possibility that we could never see was that if we were defeated, we would lose all of our Pokémon. A really cruel fate that arose as a result of Satoshi Tojiri wanting to take over the Menko card game. Typical of Japan, when players lose playing Menko, they must deal various cards to the winners.
Despite this, from Game Freak they understood that the frustration for the user would be too great, so they banished the idea. Finally, having no experience creating RPGs, the studio I wasn’t sure how to implement a life barwhich is why text was initially chosen.