Pokemon

               Pokemon’s beginnings go back much, much further than one might think. Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori founded Game Freak in 1989, after their passion for publishing homebrew game strategy guides blossomed into full-on game creation. After analyzing what the Game Boy hardware was capable of, the fledgling firm created a design document in 1990 for a game titled Capsule Monsters, based upon the idea of collecting, training, trading, and battling monsters in duels using the Game Boy’s system link cable.

             Pokemon as a whole has sweep across nations of crazed children overnight.  Created in 1995 by Satoshi Tajiri, the entire series is developed and owned by Nintendo.  Becoming the second most successful and lucrative video game-based media franchise in the world, beaten only by Nintendo’s very own Mario series.  Despite popular belief, the Pokemon television series isn’t how the craze started.  The series actually started as a Game Boy game called “Pocket Monsters” in Japan.  It was an instant hit and eventually got its own television series by the same name in April of 1997.

            Many Poke-fans look back fondly on the days of when Pokemon Red Version and Blue Verision and the original 151 were released to the masses, but what many people don’t realize is that Red and Blue weren’t the original duo that debuted in Japan.  In February of 1996, Pokemon was first unleashed into the form of Pokemon Red and Pokemon Green.  Red and Green proved to be massive sale success, but the games had a few lingering issues; they were incredibly buggy, and rough around the edges in a lot of places.  To help with these issues, Game Freak developed and released Pokemon Blue later in the year, Blue featured notable improvements; the battle graphics were overhauled, numerous bugs were caught and corrected, previously unobtainable wild Pokemon could be caught, certain areas were re-mapped, and the infamous Lavender Town music was made far less grim-sounding.

            In 1998 when Pokemon was introduced to America, the creators feared that the cute design would not appeal to western gamers; however, Pokemon became a cult phenomenon almost overnight.  Under the slogan Gotta Catch ‘em All!, millions of children flocked to the stores, begging parents for a copy of Pokemon Red or Pokemon Blue.  The Trading Card Game was also introduced to North America in the beginning of the next year by Wizards of the Coast.  Pokemon even to this day is a huge franchise. 


           Billions of people enjoy the series, and the now adults, who were children when the series was first release still have fond memories of getting their first Pokemon, making that difficult decision on which one of the three starters to choose, catching the legendary birds, finding your favorite Pokemon that you continue to catch every new game you started, and beating the Elite Four.  Pokemon is a series that will be remembered for many years to come, and those children who first started playing the series from the beginning will never forget what they loved.

Article by: Matt Scott