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This process probably accounted for around three of those six years. After that, once we were happy with our designs, we started working on the moves they could each use. “We started by creating loads of different Pokémon designs, then we reduced that down to the favourite 150. “From the inception of the idea to the completion of Red & Blue took a total of about six years, so a long time!” smiles current producer Junichi Masuda, whose involvement on earlier titles was mainly in coding and penning the music of the original games, later taking on directorial and production duties on every mainline release.

In fact, it sounds as though the team always had more ideas than would be possible to fit into the memory capacity of a Game Boy cartridge. The vision started out small, originally targeting a creature count of around 50 monsters but with that number growing steadily as new ideas were hatched and improved hardware and coding techniques emerged around them. Quinty, or Mendel Palaxe as you might know it, was a simple action-puzzle game released for the NES in 1989, its completion heralding the start of something much bigger, much more ambitious in scale, something that we know today as Pokemon. If you want in-depth features on classic video games delivered straight to your doorstop (or your inbox), then you really should subscribe to Retro Gamer. This feature first appeared in Retro Gamer magazine. Then Mr Masuda joined and our first game was Quinty.” As we talked, we became friends and discussed how arcade games were often very similar – if we were developing them, what would we do differently? When we started, some of the readers were programmers and they had the skills and access to the hardware – that’s how we started in producing video games. A few people would visit these stores and see the book, and I was one of them. It talked about strategies for arcade games because, at the time, there were no home consoles. Back in 1983, Mr Tajiri started selling this little booklet for ¥200 and it was sold only in very specialist bookstores. “We used to play video games together and that’s how we started this company – Mr Tajiri started a company and I joined. “Mr Tajiri was the founder of Game Freak and I was a friend of his when I was a student,” recalls veteran Game Freak artist Ken Sugimori, the art director and character designer on pretty much all of the games and who has been responsible for official art assets. Well, a lot earlier – all the way back in 1990, in fact, or even earlier if you want to track the origins of the most important people behind the franchise. But while that might have been the start of the phenomenon as we know it, our story begins earlier.