Pokemon Pinball: The Cartridge That Shook in Your Hands
Some cartridges are games. This one is also a piece of hardware. Pokemon Pinball, released in 1999, is a spin-off built on the oldest idea in the arcade: a steel ball, two flippers and a sloping table. What made it strange was the cartridge itself, which buzzed and shook in the player's hands thanks to a rumble motor built right into the Game Pak.
It was designed for the Game Boy Color, yet it still plays on the original 1989 Game Boy, and it was even given its own Game Boy hardware number, which is why this museum files it among the accessories rather than the games. A game that is also a gadget.
Catching Pokemon with a steel ball
The idea was simple and a little mad: catch Pokemon by playing pinball. Developed by Jupiter and HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo, the game splits play across two tables, the Red Field and the Blue Field, named after the Red and Blue versions and each stocked with different creatures, so catching all 150 means mastering both. Rather than battling, the player lights up a row of GET lights, reveals a silhouette in the middle of the table, colours it in piece by piece with well-aimed shots, and finally knocks it into a Poke Ball. A separate Evolution Mode lets caught Pokemon evolve by steering the ball onto the right target, whether an experience marker, an evolution stone or a link cable. It turned the familiar loop of catch, train and evolve into something played with pure reflexes.
A cartridge that shakes
The showpiece was the rumble. Pokemon Pinball was one of the very few Game Boy cartridges ever to carry a motor inside it, powered by a single AAA battery tucked into the back of the Game Pak, so every bumper and launch could be felt as well as seen. Nintendo treated it as serious hardware: the European release even added strength settings, letting players choose between mild and strong, and on the Super Game Boy, which could not pass the vibration through, the feature simply switched off. Because the cartridge counted as a piece of hardware in its own right, it was assigned its own Game Boy hardware number, an unusual distinction for a game and the reason it sits on the accessory shelf here.
Still at home on the grey brick
For all its colour, Pokemon Pinball never left the original Game Boy behind. Played on the 1989 machine, it runs with a few changes: the table borders take on a different texture, the lettering on the lights disappears, and the small animations in the Pokedex are switched off. The infrared high-score swapping needs a Game Boy Color, so that feature stays dark on the older hardware. But the pinball plays, and so does the rumble, which is exactly why a title sold for the newer console still belongs in a collection built around the grey brick.
Trivia worth the tilt
A few details reward a closer look. Pokemon Pinball reached Japan in April 1999 and the United States that June, a full seven months before Gold and Silver, and it quietly smuggled in a preview: the Blue Field's main theme shares its melody with the music of Ecruteak City and Cianwood City in the second-generation games that had not yet shipped. The game also hid a cruel joke in Mew. After clearing the Mewtwo bonus stage twice, Mew could appear, but actually catching it meant striking it 1,024 times, 256 hits for each of the four steps of the catch, making it all but impossible by honest play. The scoring ran to similar extremes: a single game could hold 255 caught Pokemon, and catching a 256th rolled the counter back to zero and wiped the list, handing over a bonus of one billion points as consolation. There is even a quirk of text: the Japanese cartridge drew its Pokedex entries from Pokemon Yellow, but because Pinball reached the West before Yellow did, the English version used the entries from Red and Blue instead.
Pokemon Pinball sits in the Game Boy Museum collection as the Pokemon title that is also a piece of hardware. For the wider story, see Pokemon on the Game Boy. This piece is part of Pokemon and the Game Boy, the museum's guide to the whole Pokemon corner.
Comments