Uploaded February 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Pokemon is the biggest media franchise on the entire planet, but this was far from guaranteed. The development of Pokemon Red and Green was full of challenges, and any one of them could have spelled failure for the entire project. Let's find out how these games were made, and why they almost never existed!
00:00 Intro
01:15 Satoshi Tajiri before Pokemon (SPEEDRUN)
07:15 Inspirations for Pokemon
09:43 Pitching the Game
14:18 Financial Difficulties
16:59 The Internal List / Phase 1
20:09 Phase 2 - Introducing Types!
22:07 Phase 3 - Evolution + Atsuko Nishida!
24:58 Designing Pikachu
27:34 Storage Limitations
28:46 Phase 4
29:29 Starter Pokemon + End of Internal List
30:54 Version-exclusive Pokemon and Encouraging Trades
32:37 The Battle System
34:44 Story Rewrites and Release
36:04 Mew and Finding Success in Japan
38:02 Coming to America
39:45 The rest is history
41:22 Outro
Pokemon is the biggest media franchise on the entire planet, but this was far from guaranteed. The development of Pokemon Red and Green was full of challenges, and any one of them could have spelled failure for the entire project. Let's find out how these games were made, and why they almost never existed!
00:00 Intro
01:15 Satoshi Tajiri before Pokemon (SPEEDRUN)
07:15 Inspirations for Pokemon
09:43 Pitching the Game
14:18 Financial Difficulties
16:59 The Internal List / Phase 1
20:09 Phase 2 - Introducing Types!
22:07 Phase 3 - Evolution + Atsuko Nishida!
24:58 Designing Pikachu
27:34 Storage Limitations
28:46 Phase 4
29:29 Starter Pokemon + End of Internal List
30:54 Version-exclusive Pokemon and Encouraging Trades
32:37 The Battle System
34:44 Story Rewrites and Release
36:04 Mew and Finding Success in Japan
38:02 Coming to America
39:45 The rest is history
41:22 Outro
