For several years now, Pokémon has been the largest media franchise in the world: a vast set of products, content and intellectual properties whose total revenues have reached almost 100 billion euros. In economic terms, the entire world of Pokémon is worth more than those of Harry Potter and Star Wars combined. Thanks to Pokémon, hundreds of millions of copies of video games have been sold, the first of which came out on February 27, 1996, twenty-five years ago. And then dozens of books and films have been published, over a thousand episodes of an anime have been made and, among many other things, over 30 billion playing cards have been sold, one of which for a cost of about 330 thousand euros.
It all started in the early nineties, from the idea of a video game programmer not yet thirty. Who, seeing that two different Game Boys could be connected via cable and exchanging information and content in that way, decided to turn the great passion he had for insects as a boy into a video game – indeed: into two video games.
The creator of the Pokémon is called Satoshi Tajiri, born in 1965 in Machida: a city that when he was a child and boy was quite rural and surrounded by a bit of greenery, but which in more recent years is it was practically incorporated by neighboring Tokyo. In the seventies Tajiri began looking for and collecting insects, to the point of earning the nickname “Doctor Insect”. Interviewed in the late nineties by Time, Tajiri said:
«Insects fascinated me. For one thing, it made me laugh as they moved. Besides, they were strange. Every new insect I found was a mystery to me. And the more I looked for, the more I found . Usually I took them home and in the meantime I learned things, even that some ate others. At one point I stopped taking them home, but I developed a number of ways to catch them. “
Tajiri explained that he was the best hunter and insect connoisseur of his circle of friends and that although he didn't do anything to make it happen, sometimes certain insects “would fight each other.” The passion of Tajiri and some of his peers with whom he exchanged techniques, information and insects was however severely tested by urbanization, which reduced the research possibilities of those young amateur entomologists.
Growing up, Tajiri began to get interested in manga, anime, the TV series Ultraman, and arcade video games of the late seventies and early eighties. As he said, his first real passion for gaming was for Space Invaders. After finishing high school with difficulty, he took a two-year course in electronics and computer science and from 1981 to 1986 he edited and published Game Freak, a fanzine dedicated to arcade video games: the cabinets, arcade games, generally coin operated. . It was handwritten, with the pages stapled together, but it made itself known because, among other things, it analyzed and explained in detail certain game strategies, also revealing any easter eggs (hidden parts, often useless but still funny, of certain video games). To Time he said:
«The most successful issue had a circulation of 10 thousand copies, and each cost 300 yen. At 18, therefore, I already had my own business well underway. At first I made photocopies, but then as the number of copies sold increased I stopped writing by hand and got myself a printer. “
Game Freak also had collaborators and one of them was the illustrator Ken Sugimori, who would later become the illustrator of the first 151 Pokémon. At the end of the eighties, however, Tajiri was not satisfied with commenting and – after having studied and procured the necessary – he transformed Game Freak into a small and artisanal video game production house. The first product developed, in 1989 was Mendel Palace, an action video game with 100 levels, in which the protagonist had to free the girlfriend who had been kidnapped.
And already in the early nineties Tajiri started to think that the Game Link cable with which two Game Boys could be connected offered great and very interesting possibilities to develop video games that favor the exchange and competitive interaction between multiple players. “That cable really attracted me a lot” he explained to Time “and I imagined real organisms that could really move inside it, back and forth”.
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Thinking back to his passion for insects, he began to design a game whose goal was to find and collect small “pocket monsters”. The first name he thought of was Capsule Monsters, followed by the abbreviations CapuMon and KapuMon. In the end, however, the choice fell on Pocket Monsters and the abbreviation Pokémon (the accent on the “e” was put to prevent the Anglo-Saxons from ending up not pronouncing it).
Tajiri devoted years of I work on that idea of his, putting the business of Game Freak at risk, from which five employees left in the first half of the nineties. Apparently no more than nine people worked on what would become the first Pokémon games.
At some point in development, Tajiri went to Nintendo – which had been producing and selling since 1989. i Game Boy, the most famous portable video game console in history – to propose his idea. After some initial hesitation, Nintendo decided to give him a chance and believe in that project, despite in the meantime Game Boy games began to look like the past and computer or PlayStation games the future.
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According to Tajiri, the real innovation of his games lay in the fact that the cable – which already several other games they used to make players compete – it could be used above all to exchange what today, according to the official Pokémon website, are «creatures of various shapes and sizes that live in nature together with human beings. Most Pokémon do not speak and can only pronounce their own name “.
Also inspired by a series of real and imaginary animals that were not insects, Tajiri then thought of dozens of” creatures », giving each of them a name that in addition to having a beautiful sound also had a meaning. The name Pikachu – an “electric” Pokémon that in some ways resembles a mouse – was born for example from the combination of a sound that according to the Japanese is that of an electric shock, and from the word used to indicate the squeak of a rodent.
While creating his first Pokémon, Tajiri also developed the rules of the world in which he imagined them to live and, consequently, the rules of the games he was designing. He decided, among other things, that Pokémon would be hunted down and caught just as he did with insects, and that the worst possible outcome of a Pokémon fight would be fainting. In fact, he explained that he did not want to see either death or blood, so as not to add “useless violence” to the world. (Instead, for years, there has been a whole big question that revolves around the question: in the world of Pokémon, do people eat Pokémon?)
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Apparently, it was instead one of Tajiri's collaborators who had the idea of releasing two very similar games at the same time. they had some Pokemon within them that were different from each other. So that whoever had one of the two games had to connect via cable with someone in possession of the other. The two games, Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green, were released in Japan on February 27, 1996 and were immediately a great success.
The players quickly realized the existence of a mysterious Pokémon called Mew, which a apparently it was created secretly by the developers of the game without the knowledge of Nintendo: according to what is said by exploiting a small memory space obtained in the last stages of development of the game in the cartridges that contained it. Tajiri talked about it like this:
«Mew was not included in the games at the beginning, and it was not possible to find one while playing. To get it, you had to interact with Game Freak or Nintendo. There were 150 Pokémon, and Mew was number 151. The only way to get one was by trading it with others. This created a myth around the game, it kept the interest alive. “
There are also those who believe that in addition to technical, aesthetic and narrative issues related to those strange fictional creatures, Pokémon they were so successful because they were the best product of what is known in Japan as “the lost decade”. That is, that particular period, following the great financial crisis that hit the country in 1991, in which many certainties were lost and, among other things, we took refuge in what is known as iyashi: a particular type of escapism which, among other things, led to a growing interest in commercial products such as the Paro and AIBO “companion robots”, such as Tamagotchi and, in some ways, Pokémon. They too, in fact, were “virtual companions”.
In October 1996 the first Pokémon cards arrived in Japan and in 1997 the first episodes of the anime arrived which – for a decision in which Tajiri was not involved – he chose to bet heavily on Pikachu, who was just a Pokémon like any other in the games. In a couple of years from Japan, the two games reached the rest of the world and with them what someone began to call Pokémania. Years later, then, would come that smartphone game that everyone seemed to be playing a few summers ago, wandering around the parks with the arm outstretched in search of Pokémon to capture in a simple but very effective augmented reality.
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A Time Tajiri – a guy described as “eccentric and lonely” – said in the 1999: «Nowadays kids don't have much time to relax. So I thought of a game that could help them think about other things during those five or ten minute breaks “.
