![]() We really didn’t expect that it would be a massive global success or anything. ![]() Even when we were talking to our friends in the industry and saying that, “Oh, we’re working on a Game Boy game,” they were like, “Really? You’re working on a Game Boy game? That’s not going to sell very well, don’t you think?” That’s kind of what the atmosphere was like in Japan at the time. You didn’t really see so many people playing it out and about at that point. Near the end of development, we started to get really worried because we were Game Boy.Īt the time in Japan, the Game Boy had been on a decline. It really took us that long to get to a point where we could release it. Masuda: When we were first about to release the game, actually we were it’s six years of development. What were you expecting to come out of the release of this game? Did you guys think, “Oh, we have this huge hit on our hands,” or “We’re very passionate about this game and we just want to get it out?” Pokémon will always be the perfect Game Boy game We carry on that kind of philosophy even today. But we started with that core group of people who really had a shared vision of what we want to make and bring our own interesting ideas to the table to really just make it the best game possible. The team for Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee!, at the very end, we’re probably about 100 people total. We definitely take that kind of that teamwork-focused work style, and that’s part of the Game Freak culture now. It was really because of that kind of teamwork that I think that Pokémon, the original games, just came out to be as interesting and as fun as they were. We were able to get by by doing other projects for different companies along the way to make ends meet, while also on the side, people who wanted to work on Pokémon within their in the time they had from those other projects, to implement interesting ideas that they had and really put in all of their, I guess, really just creative energy into Pokémon. It took about six years for the entire development of the original Red and Green games. Obviously, we payroll and all that, so we needed to make sure that was also a huge success and it would sell very well. At the same time, we had this requirement to run as a company. We wanted to make the games that we really cared about wanting to make. We knew we wanted to make games that we all as members at Game Freak wanted to play ourselves. We were just a few people, and obviously, we didn’t have a lot of huge hits on our hands at Game Freak. Junichi Masuda, composer and programmer on Pokémon Red / Green / Blue director of Pokémon: Let’s Go! and many more: At the very beginning, we were still a pretty new company. What was it like working on that original game? What was it like at Game Freak back then - that special time when you were still unsure of if this game was going to be a huge hit? ![]() You’ve been around since the beginning of Pokémon. That includes Pokémon: Let’s Go!, which is out this November.īelow, read our full Q&A with the Pokémon veteran, as he recalls working at Game Freak like it was a “college club,” long before the studio broke big - and how life has changed then. To better connect the dots from then to now, we reached out to one of the people who’s been with Pokémon since before the series took over the world: Game Freak’s Junichi Masuda, who has composed the music for every mainline Pokémon RPG, as well as directed nearly every entry since the Game Boy Advance days. And it feels especially important that these Nintendo Switch games are launching in 2018 - two decades after Pokémon Red and Blue first captivated audiences in North America. It’s a new version, of sorts, of the original games. One of the most exciting things about Pokémon: Let’s Go! is that it’s very much like a throwback nostalgia piece.
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