Pokemon on the Game Boy: The Little Monsters That Saved a Dying Machine

By the start of 1996 the Game Boy looked like a machine living on borrowed time. It was seven years old, its screen still glowed in four shades of grey-green, and the rest of the industry had raced ahead to 32-bit consoles, polygons and CD-ROM. Then a small studio in Tokyo released two cartridges about catching creatures in tall grass, and the ageing handheld suddenly had years of life left in it.

The games were Pocket Monsters Red and Green, and the studio was Game Freak. What they began is now one of the largest entertainment franchises on Earth. At the time, though, it was the stubborn passion project of one man who liked bugs.

A boy who collected insects

Satoshi Tajiri grew up outside Tokyo in the 1960s and 70s, wading through streams and fields to collect insects. As the countryside was paved over for new housing, the ponds and woods where he had hunted beetles disappeared. Years later, when he imagined a game about creatures that children could catch, keep and swap, that childhood was the seed. Two monsters passing down a cable felt, to him, like two kids comparing jars of bugs.

Tajiri and his colleagues at Game Freak spent roughly six years building the game. The studio was tiny and repeatedly ran short of money; several staff left, and Tajiri reportedly went without a salary for long stretches. Nintendo backed the project through Creatures Inc., and Shigeru Miyamoto himself mentored the team. Even inside Nintendo, few believed a role-playing game about trading monsters, arriving at the very end of the Game Boy's life, had any chance.

Red, Green and the cable nobody used

Pocket Monsters Red and Pocket Monsters Green arrived in Japan on 27 February 1996. One mischievous design decision sat right at the centre. There were 151 monsters to collect, but no single cartridge held them all: some species appeared only in Red, others only in Green. To fill the roster you had to find another player, join the two Game Boys with a link cable, and trade.

• 

  Red or Green? In 1996 that question started friendships.

• 

  Red or Green? In 1996 that question started friendships.

That link cable had existed since 1989, used mostly to play Tetris head to head. Pokemon turned it into something social and essential. Trading was not a bonus feature, it was the whole point. Some creatures would only evolve after being traded, so even completing your own collection meant knocking on a friend's door. A children's game quietly became a network.

The two versions also gave rise to a legend. A programmer tucked a final creature, Mew, into leftover memory late in development, and it did not appear in the official guides. Rumours of a hidden monster spread across playgrounds for years, and the mystery only made the games more irresistible.

For those who wanted to put their Monster exchange to the extreme

Blue, Yellow and Pikachu at your heels

Later in 1996 came Pokemon Blue, first offered in Japan as a special edition with redrawn sprites and rewritten text. When the games finally reached the West in 1998, Nintendo used Blue's improved engine but kept the familiar Red and Green line-ups, releasing the pair internationally as Red and Blue. For most players outside Japan, that was the first Pokemon they ever met.

• 

  The two cartridges that refused to let the Game Boy retire.

• 

  The two cartridges that refused to let the Game Boy retire.

Then, in 1998, came the most charming entry of the original run. Pokemon Yellow was tuned to match the wildly popular animated series. Your starter was Pikachu, and rather than sitting in its ball it followed you across the map, its expression changing depending on how you treated it. A small touch, but it turned a menu of statistics into something that felt alive.

The little monsters that saved the machine

The effect on the Game Boy was extraordinary. A console the industry had written off became the thing every child wanted, and Nintendo kept the hardware alive long enough to launch the Game Boy Color in 1998, with Pokemon leading the way. A franchise that began as one designer's memory of catching beetles went on to sell hundreds of millions of games and spawn an anime, a trading-card craze and a merchandising empire that has never really stopped.

It is easy to forget, holding a modern Pokemon game, that all of this started on a monochrome handheld with a green screen and a cable dangling off the side. That is exactly why it belongs here.

You can find these cartridges in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series.