The first Pokémon Game Boy games Pocket Monsters Red and Green were released in 1996. But as Shigeru Miyamoto points out, they were held up. The reason? EarthBound.
In a newly released video to celebrate Pokémon‘s 20th anniversary, Shigeru Miyamoto talked about the franchise’s early years, working for six years testing what would become Red and Green.
“The reason it took so long was because we were also working on EarthBound. Once that was finished, we were able to move full speed ahead with Pokémon.” EarthBound was released in 1994 in Japan on the SNES.
“My main contribution was working with Tajiri-san and his team on creating a new way to play using a Nintendo Game Link Cable to connect two Game Boy systems,” Miyamoto added.
Of course, Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of Pokémon, pitched the idea to Nintendo, and then toiled away, barely scraping by until the games were released. And the rest, as they say, is now video game history.
[Image: Nintendo | GameFreak / Remixed by Gergo Vas]
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One response to “The First Pokémon Games Took So Long To Make Because Of EarthBound”
My beloved Red Version, which I (my mum) bought in HK when I lived there, is still in the top 5 of my all time favourite games! I knew nothing about pokemon, but was sold when the guy in the store really pushed and recommended it.
I subsequently took four days off school as the idea of these little creatures, that I get to train, quickly became an obsession.
This game was way ahead of its time in terms of its complexity and variation! 151 of these little guys? Wow!
What awesome memories! I even had friends who tried their hand at Japanese in order to get through Green Version.