Discarded Pokémon Ideas: Buy instead of Catch and over 65,000 versions

Buy Pokemon with in-game currency? Instead of two versions, 65,000 different ones? This is what the first Pokémon games could have looked like, according to a study by the YouTube channel Did You Know Gaming.

Just buy Pokemon in the store

For its video, the channel looked at many old interviews with series creator Satoshi Tajiri and other developers, and got some exciting behind-the-scenes insights. For example, that it was originally planned to buy the monsters in Pokémon with an in-game currency.

“In the early development of Pokémon, you could buy Pokémon with money,” Tajiri said in an interview from the early 2000s. However, that would have made players focus more on saving money than catching the monsters.

“We also considered having a player pay money in addition to their trade if there is an apparent difference in the value of two Pokémon being traded, but implementing Pokémon cash values ​​was beyond the limits of our programming,” said Tajiri. There were just too many obstacles.

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“We had no choice but to focus on what we wanted most and forego the rest. In this case, the ability to trade Pokémon was our top priority, so we eliminated the monetary value feature.”

According to Game Freak developer Akihito Tomisawa, there should have been a store selling Pokémon in every town. So with enough currency, you could have bought “tons” of Pokémon, Tomisawa said in a book he wrote in 2000.

How 65,000 versions became two

Today we know the two Pokémon editions red and blue. However, Game Freak originally wanted the first game in the series to have as many as 65,000 versions. A randomly assigned number between 1 and 65,000 after the start of the game should determine which Pokémon appear and also the elements should be influenced with it.

In a 1996 book called PokeDex, only available in Japan, programmer Takenori Oota reveals, “We also considered that each game generates a random ID number and that number determines which Pokémon appear in the game. ”

Tajiri said in a 1997 issue of Famimanga 64 that Shigeru Miyamoto was the reason for the two color versions. “I wanted to make a game that would be different for everyone, but it was difficult,” Tajiri said. “So I consulted with Shigeru Miyamoto from Nintendo, and we finally decided to make it so that the worlds would be parallel but different depending on the color – whether it was red or green.”

In the 2000 book “Pokémon Story”, which was also only published in Japan, Tajiri explained the concept of the 65,000 editions in more detail: Since the IDs of the cartridges were determined at random, all Pokémon caught in these games carried them ID number. Unless someone traded with 65,000 different people, the likelihood of trading with someone who had the same ID was unlikely.”

Miyamoto would have found the system interesting, but also too difficult to understand. “He said if the players can’t see that, it won’t work and it would be better if the color or the look of the games were different.”

So in the different color editions of the game – red and green in Japan and red and blue in the west – there ended up being a small selection of Pokémon that were only present in this particular version. This should encourage players to trade via link cable. The concept of multiple versions of a Pokémon game has survived to this day.