This article takes you through a brief history of the inspiration for Pokémon Red, Blue, and Green, and provides translations for concept art.

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Life Before Pokémon

In 1989, two events happened that were important for the development of Pokémon. First off, Nintendo released the Game Boy. 5 days later, future Pokémon developers Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori turned Game Freak, their self-published gaming fanzine, into a video game company.

The Game Boy was originally seen as a system geared towards puzzle and action games. Indeed, the handheld saw many releases that fell into these categories. Then came the release of a Square RPG known in English as The Final Fantasy Legend. When Tajiri saw how successful it was, he realized that even non-action games were possible on a portable system.

What Tajiri really had his eye on, however, was the Game Boy’s linking functionality. This data transfer system inspired the developer to dream up a game in which players would be able to trade with each other. Tajiri was also a fan of Ultra Seven, a TV fantasy series that was a followup to Ultraman, from which he got the idea of capsule monsters. He adopted the name Capsule Monsters for the RPG he set out to plan. The game, he imagined, would have monsters in containers similar to capsule toys travelling back and forth via the Game Link Cable. In the fall of 1990, Tajiri brought the project proposal he’d created to Nintendo, who decided to fund its development.

Tajiri was unable to trademark the name Capsule Monsters due to copyright issues, and the shortened version of the game’s name, Capumon, just didn’t sound very nice. Accordingly, he revised the title to Pocket Monsters, which was then shortened to “Pokémon”.

Capsule Monsters

So, just what did that original project proposal for Pokémon look like? In 2009, a book was released in Japan that provided us with a glimpse. Known as Satoshi Tajiri: The Man who Created Pokémon (ISBN: 4840127751), it covered the development history of a number of Game Freak games, including the early Pokémon titles.

I initially found a cache of images from this book on an alternative gaming news site called Tikisaurus. I searched around the web to find a couple more, and combined it with previously-translated developer interviews to bring you a look at Pokémon’s early history!

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