Satoshi Tajiri, as we all know, is one of the key figures behind the incredibly successful Pokémon series. However, it's important to remember that Tajiri's interest in game development began long before he had the idea of linking two Game Boy consoles together in order to share fictional monsters and produced one of Nintendo's most successful franchises.
Like so many young people in Japan at the close of the '70s, Tajiri became hooked on Taito's Space Invaders, as well as other classic titles, such Namco's Dig Dug. His interest eventually evolved into wanting to make his own games, and he apparently even went as far as to disassemble his Famicom to figure out how it worked.
Prior to that feat of amateur engineering, Tajiri entered Sega's 'TV Game Idea' contest in 1981. He was one of the winners, alongside Yochi Maekawa, and was presented with the award by lead Sega engineer Shikanosuke Ochi on December 25th, 1981 – that's 40 years ago this month.
Maekawa's winning concept was called Super Locomotive, and Sega title with that name would eventually see release in arcades in 1982 (although its designer and programmer is listed as Fukumura Mizunaga). Tajiri's idea, Spring Stranger, was never released.
Around the same time, Tajiri started producing his Game Freak fanzine, which ran until 1986. This is how he met legendary Pokémon illustrator Ken Sugimori, who came on board as a contributor after spotting an issue in a local store. The pair quickly decided they wanted to make their own software, and Game Freak the fanzine eventually became Game Freak the developer, with the NES title Mendel Palace / Quinty being its first release. Game Freak would go on to produce titles for Nintendo, such as Yoshi (NES, Game Boy) and Mario & Wario (Super Famicom) before Tajiri pitched the idea of Pokémon; the rest, as they say, is history.
While a lot happened between Tajiri winning Sega's contest and the foundation of Game Freak, it's fun to speculate about how different the games market could have been if he had been given the chance to work more closely with Sega, perhaps even as an employee.
The Game Boy was, of course, utterly integral to the success of Pokémon (and vice versa, you could argue), but Tajiri could have easily have executed the same idea on Sega's Game Gear, which also had link-up capability and was still very much an ongoing concern in the mid-'90s, despite the domination of the Game Boy. What makes this even more interesting is that Game Freak enjoyed a close relationship with Nintendo's erstwhile rival at the time, producing titles such as Pulseman and Magical Tarurūto-kun for Sega, both of which were Japanese exclusives for the Mega Drive / Genesis – so perhaps Tajiri's path could have diverted at that point, too, had he pitched the idea of Pokémon to Sega and not Nintendo.
Of course, such talk is largely pointless given how things have turned out, but we'd like to think that in some distant part of the gaming multiverse, Pokémon is published by Sega.
Oh, wait! That kinda already happened. Twice.
Comments 25
The gaming landscape would look astronomically different today if Sega had published Pokemon.
Somewhere in the 90s, print magazines would have advertised a new kind of RPG where you can trade and battle creatures with your friends... on Game Gear. The marketing buzz and subsequent Saturday morning show would have propelled Game Gear and it's new Pokemon craze to high sales.
The Game Boy, floundering on aging hardware and struggling to find a killer app, would be quietly retired.
With the Dreamcast a year away, there would be rumors buzzing about an online Pokemon Stadium game coming to it, Sega would be riding high on its success. and Nintendo would announce it would no longer be making handheld devices.
Last week's episode of How To With John Wilson featured a crackpot who believes Nintendo stole his doodles to create Pokemon. ... all because he misremembered that it's Berenstain Bears, not Berenstein Bears.
@CharlieGirl Game Freak would have been bankrupt and Pokémon clones wouldn't exist.
Pokemon would've flopped on Game Gear, and probably be remembered today as a cult classic that barely anyone played. The Game Gear was discontinued a year after Pokemon first released, and had been outsold 6-to-1 by the Game Boy by that point worldwide. I guarantee it would've been too little, too late with Sega.
This is interesting to consider, for two main reasons:
1. Would Pokemon have been as much of a success if published by SEGA?
2. Would the success of Pokemon have saved SEGA's position as a console manufacturer?
I'd say the answer to #1 is undoubtedly "no" --- Nintendo was just in a far better position than SEGA in the late 1990s, and the Gameboy had already absolutely crushed the Game Gear before Pokemon had come around. That said, it's unclear to what extent Pokemon would still have made a splash - there are too many variables to account for (would they have adapted their handheld/console strategy around it? how would they have marketed it outside of Japan? is Pokemon enough to get people to buy a SEGA system in the late 1990s?). It's also worth keeping in mind that SEGA of America was notoriously badly managed at this point so something like Pokemon might not have even made it to the West.
As for #2...it really depends on #1. Assuming that Pokemon was as successful with SEGA as it was with Nintendo...my suspicion is that we would've had the Dreamcast (or equivalent) a bit longer before SEGA ultimately went third party at the end of the 6th gen anyway. Too much damage was already done, and SEGA very much lack the innovation that has kept Nintendo afloat through the competition with Playstation and Xbox. That said, an absence of Xbox may have allowed SEGA to carve in niche in the console market well into the 2000s.
Very interesting to think about. Honestly, I'm happy that Nintendo ended up with the property as it feels very much at home on Nintendo systems.
I don't think it would had been successful if Pokemon is own by Sega and not Nintendo. Sega doesn't know how to market RPGs or are not interested in doing so thus why games like Popful Mail, Lunar, Phantasy Star, Shining Force, LandStalkers, and Beyond Oasis, all which had terrible recognition outside Japan compare to Nintendo platform RPGs like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Secret of Evermore, Breath of Fire, Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, Lufia, Star Ocean, Ogre series, and the Tales series.
This is also why Square and Enix never work with Sega back in the days as Sega was just into arcade, tech demo games (like Virtua Fighter, Space Harrier, and Virtua Racing which had no massive story and contents outside the usual base offerings), and time killer titles (games that lasted minutes and not hours) and are not interested in marketing hour long games in such case as Magic Knight Rayearth, Dragon Force, Shenmue, and Skies of Arcadia, all titles that would had done better had Sega had the advertising powers to market those games to the RPG audience worldwide. If you want an example of how terrible Sega market their RPG look no further than the mobile RPG they hype this past October for Tokyo Game Show. All that hype gone down the drain and right now almost nobody remembers or even talk about it.
Sega gave him confidence, that confidence was to create games. Mew was originally created in 1990 which in turn was almost a separate game entirely was a Pokemon.
So Sega helped give Nintendo Mr.Tajiri
Overrated series, Custom Robo Arena was a way better game on the DS.
I've been playing for the first time all Sonic games from the Adventure era (1998-2006). And I've spent some time on Chao Garden. Enough time to know what would happen if SEGA were the ones backing Pokemon.
I don't know. The way Sega and Nintendo works were too different that time. I think things would developed very different into a very different product. I'm not sure if it would be a game changer for Sega's consoles, but things could get ugly for Nintendo because Pokemon was probably the main success for portable and without that success things would be more difficult many times, specially at the Wii U era
That already happened. In 2002 to 2004. On the Sega Pico.
I think even with Pokemon Sega would have failed at the hardware business and Nintendo would barely be any different from what it is today.
@Specter_of-the_OLED Exactly. There would be no Pokemon today without Nintendo.
"The Game Boy was, of course, utterly integral to the success of Pokémon (and vice versa, you could argue), but Tajiri could have easily have executed the same idea on Sega's Game Gear, which also had link-up capability and was still very much an ongoing concern in the mid-'90s, despite the domination of the Game Boy"
Executed sure. So could have the Neo Geo Pocket and the Wonder Swan Color. Both were in a better position than the GameGear at the time. Which was mostly just supported for spare parts. You couldn't really buy a Game Gear any where easily after 1995. Might as well have been completely pulled from shelves.
honestly I think it's success is because of the anime, it had little to do with the GB aside from its nice install base. They played it safe. Though I think Nintendo Pushed for the Anime, but an actual pokemon fan might know the actual answer to that statement.
So my take here is this; Was the Pokémon IP worth around $695.7 million dollars in 2002?
That's the year when, to prevent bankruptcy, Isao Okawa donated his $695m in stock to the company. That keep them afloat until 2004 when they were sold to Sammy Corporation.
If publishing Pokémon was enough to keep the company from needing Okawa's stock in 2002, his controlling interest would prevent Sammy's takeover. If the stock was up for grabs, given Nintendo was extremely interesting in buying up all remnants of Sega's console business and how they know a good thing when they see it, I think they would have bought Sega in 2004 if that included the Pokémon IP, then split off the arcade and electronics divisions and sold them to Sammy.
That means Nintendo might have still had control of Pokémon in time to publish the Red/Green remake so I don't see the series drastically changing.
@HeadPirate There is no way Pokémon would've been that valuable in 2002 if it had been published on Game Gear. 60 million Game Boys had been sold by the end of 1996. Only 10 million Game Gears had been sold by then, less than 2 million in Japan. Pokémon Red, Green, and Blue sold 10 million units lifetime in Japan. The Game Gear's install base would've crippled the series out of the gate.
That would have been terrible. The OG game boy ran for 15 hours on 4 double A batteries. The Game Gear took six and ran for 3 hours. It was enough anxiety as a kid keeping 4 batteries around to put a hundred plus hours into Gen 1. I can imagine how bad it would have been to up that to six and not even making it through a day on one set. The Game Gear was not made for RPGs.
@Maulbert
Game gear would have sold more then 10m if Pokémon was on it. In fact, it's in every possible way the better handheld, so it's not hard to see it outselling the Game Boy with a more attractive line up. This cascades; now all the 3rd party titles want to be in Game gear because it's the hot system, which makes more people choose Game gear. Also remember that video games only make up about 10%-20% of Pokémon's brand value and SEGA would have been better position to capitalize on the IP given they were manufacturing something close to 70% of all arcade and gambling machines in Japan and SK.
That's why hypotheticals like this are very difficult and your best to just look at the large, over arching trends. SEGA's arcade and electronics still would have bankrupted the company even if it's console division was bringing in 10x what they were (the same way Sony would have went bankrupt at the heart of PS hype if they didn't sell their fanatical business), so that's a fact I can look at and say "this happens regardless" with the only question being if the CEO and board still hold 50% plus 1 of the stock, and that's completely tied to if Pokémon makes SEGA something close to 700m or not.
Nintendo probably would have had enough money for a hostile takeover even without the gameboy if the stocks were in the wild.
Things get interesting if they didn't have the money ... because we would likely have a 2004 relaunch of Xbox in Japan with Pokémon games bundled in and that would drastically change the landscape. They looked at buying Sony at the time, but it wasn't worth the extra cost of the regulation nightmare. Getting Pokémon and a successful handheld from the deal would change that for sure.
I see it differently. Tetris and Mario were Nintendo killer apps, released before Pokémon. Pokémon would have died with the game gear since no one would have heard of it. A few years later, Nintendo would think it’s a good idea to do a game called Nintendmon and it would be a global success and we would even see a smartphone app. Pokémon released in like 96, and if anything, it gave Nintendo a reason to not upgrade hardware because it renewed interest in a dying system.
@Donutman
I think this is a good take, Tetris was already a killer app for Gameboy and the Game Gear struggled. But I think you have to account that SEGA's market dominance in other areas would likely more then make up for that. When there are several different Pokémon arcade games in every arcade in Japan and Korea, claw games in every corner store are filled with Pikachu, there is a Pokémon themed game room in every casino and pachinko den, and SEGA can bring their media empire to bare in promoting it ... they can make a mascot into a hit.
I mean ... the Famicom outsold the Mega drive and SEGA console division closed shop in 2001 but their marketing machine was enough to ensure we would still somehow get 60 new sonic games and fans would keep demanding new ones despite them all bring horrible.
@HeadPirate Sega was already winding down production of the Game Gear by that time. They were already hard to find. You think they would have put any marketing budget behind a game releasing on a dead system? And yes, the Game Gear was dead by then. It had been crushed by the Game Boy. Also, don't forget, by the time Pokémon came west in 1998, the Game Gear had completely ceased production.
@Maulbert
I get where you are going, but I think you're focusing on things that so tiny in the grand scheme they are easily accounted for. You have to move away from arguments that "beg the question". Pokémon would have failed on Game gear because without Pokémon the game gear failed. Sure ... but the whole argument here is would it still have failed with Pokémon. Things would have played out differently and so many ways we're basically just guessing.
Pokémon would have likely brought the game gear to the west sooner, the Pico or Saturn team would have been assigned to make a new handheld, everything plays out differently.
And also .. yes absolutely you market your IP even if your console is failing, if it's a good IP. How many AAA Sonic games are we getting between 2020 and 2023? It's not like the money they spent marketing sonic was wasted because they stop making consoles in 2001. Hell he's likely brought in dozens of times the revenue of their entire console division at this point.
@HeadPirate What your not understanding is that the Game Gear wasn't failing when Pokémon came out, it had already FAILED. Pokémon wouldn't have had a 100% attach rate because no game has that, and it very likely wouldn't have even sold 1 million copies on Game Gear in Japan. Sega had moved on. Fans had moved on. There is no way Pokémon could've saved the Game Gear in 1996, and by extension, become the juggernaut it is.
Now, if Pokémon had come out on Game Gear no later than 1993, you've got an argument. But '96 was too late. It would've been a lost gem.
Would history have repeated and an up-and-rising Sega developer have assisted Gamefreak in putting Kanto into Gamegear Pokemon Gold and Silver?
If Pokemon becomes a Sega property, which assuming Sega still supports the Game Gear beyond mid 90s.. Pokemon would have make the jump to full color on the Red and Blue version. Also, if they further release it on Dreamcast, it could make a similar jump to the online arena.. and the option to bring the critters out through VMU instead of Pokéwalker. Once again Sega was ahead of its time in its technology.
@Curbie That's why the Game Gear had a power adapter!
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