Why Did the First Pokémon Games Make Players Trade With Friends?

1. The Link Cable Inspired Trading

Satoshi Tajiri, who came up with Pokémon, grew up in Machida, a town on the edge of Tokyo that was still rural at the time. As a child he collected insects, and he and his friends swapped them with each other[3].

In 1989 Nintendo released the Game Boy, a handheld game console that could be linked to a second Game Boy with a short cord called the Game Link Cable. The World Video Game Hall of Fame, run by The Strong National Museum of Play in New York, says that when Tajiri saw this, he imagined an insect crawling between the two systems through the cable[1]. The news site Inverse quotes him from an earlier interview, saying, "I thought of actual living organisms moving back and forth across the cable."[2]

Here is the twist. Other games used the cable so two players could compete against each other. Tajiri pictured something different: players trading with each other[4]. That is the answer to this article's question in one line: the cable made trading possible, and trading was what Tajiri wanted players to do.

2. Why Red and Green Couldn't Be Completed Alone

Pocket Monsters Red and Green came out in Japan on February 27, 1996[5]. Each of the two games has some creatures that the other one lacks, so a player who wants to fill the whole collection has to trade with a friend who owns the other version. A few creatures will evolve into a stronger form only when they are traded[5]. The Hall of Fame puts it simply: players collected 151 creatures "either by trapping them in-game or trading them with friends"[1].

It works a little like trading cards, where every pack leaves some cards out and you fill the gaps by swapping. The difference is that a trade here happens inside the machines. Both creatures travel down the cable as game data, which is Tajiri's insect-on-a-cable picture made real, although of course nothing alive is crossing the wire.

Think about what that design asks of a player. You need a friend who owns the other version, a second Game Boy, and a cable, all in the same place. With just one Game Boy, you cannot trade, even if you own both versions. So the game quietly pushed kids to meet up.

3. Pokémon Launched at a Bad Time

You might expect a game built on trading to take off at once. It did not. Tajiri's team spent about six years on the project, and it reportedly nearly bankrupted the studio[3].

In a Nintendo interview series called Iwata Asks, Tsunekazu Ishihara of The Pokémon Company explained the timing. The games were finished in October of the year before, and he says the team wanted to ship them quickly. They missed the year-end shopping season, when many people buy gifts, and launched at the end of February. Ishihara called that "the very worst time of year to release games!"[6]. There was a second worry. The Game Boy was already aging, and Ishihara says he had a feeling the team was going to "miss the last train."[6] Tajiri has been quoted describing the moment of handing over the finished game in similar terms: the Game Boy's popularity was declining[4].

The early numbers fit that worry. Ishihara remembers checking the weekly sales figures and seeing the game "hovering around the edges of the top ten."[6] No one at the launch was sure this was the start of anything big.

4. How Mew Changed the Story

In the same interview, the developers describe what changed. The official goal of the collection was 151 creatures, and the 151st was Mew, a creature that players were not supposed to be able to find. It is reported that Shigeki Morimoto added it as an internal prank that was never meant to be shown to players[5]. In the interview, Morimoto says Mew went in "right at the very end." The game cartridge was almost full, but the developers removed the game's testing tools (features used to check for problems before release, not meant to ship), which freed up "a miniscule 300 bytes of free space"[6]. That is a tiny amount, roughly a few hundred basic text characters.

The interview also says that, without a good opportunity, Mew's existence would never have been revealed to the public[6]. The opportunity came in April 1996, in CoroCoro Comic, a Japanese comic magazine read by many children. The magazine announced a "Legendary Pokémon Offer." Twenty winners could mail in their game cartridge to have the Mew data loaded onto it, and about 78,000 people entered[6].

Satoru Iwata, then Nintendo's president, says in the interview that the response to this announcement was "really when things turned round for Pokémon." Ishihara adds that the monthly sales the game had managed up to then began to be matched by weekly sales, and then grew to three and four times that[6]. A hidden creature and a magazine contest brought thousands of children into the story, and, according to the people who ran the project, helped Pokémon sales take off.

5. Why English-Speaking Players Got Red and Blue

The magazine connection did not stop with Mew. In the fall (autumn) of 1996, CoroCoro also announced a third Japanese game, Pocket Monsters Blue, which at first could be ordered only by mail, with a form from the magazine. It went on sale in regular stores on October 10, 1999[5].

This is why the games you may have played are called Red and Blue. Pokémon Red and Blue reached North America in September 1998 and Europe in October 1999[5]. They were based on the newer Japanese Blue, which had updated artwork and new dialogue, while keeping the creature lineup of Japan's Red and Green[5]. A fan-run database, Serebii, likewise says the graphics of the English Red and Blue came from Japanese Blue[7]. So the look of that mail-order version is the one much of the world later played, and the trading idea traveled with it.

6. How to Check This Story Yourself

Some of what you just read can be checked with paper and a web browser.

• Do the odds. Twenty winners out of about 78,000 entrants is roughly 1 in 3,900, if every person sent one entry and each entry had the same chance. The interview does not say whether that was the case. How would the real odds change if some people sent several?
• Read the speakers themselves. Open the first page of the Iwata Asks interview listed in the sources. Find the lines quoted above and notice how the people who lived through the launch remember it. Do they sound as sure as this article does?
• Ask someone who played. If a parent, an aunt, or another grown-up your family trusts played on a Game Boy, ask what they could not get without another player, and how they found someone to trade with.