It is the 27. February 1996. Nintendo publishes the game "Pocket monsters" In two editions: "Aka" and "Midori", to German red and grun. Ahead of six years of development work by the Studio Game Freak. In Japan, the pocket monsters are rapidly becoming a seller, brought the Game Boy a spates comeback to finally worldwide "Pokemania" outlap.
Satoshi Tajiri lives as a child in a suburb of Tokyo. His hobby is the collection of cafes. The booming metropolis is always widening and the natural habitat for insects dwindles. In 1989, Nintendo publishes the Game Boy, a handheld game console with a special feature: Two Game Boys can be connected by game link cable, compatible "Dialogue" Allow an interaction between players. When playing Tetris, two players can compete against each other. Tajiri sees in this connection, however, a possibility to bring children to the spab to catch, collect and swap insects. Under this sign begins in 1990 at his company Game Freak the development of the Pocket Monsters.
151 pocket monsters want to be caught
Pocket Monsters Aka and Midori play in the Kanto region, which is modeled around Tokyo. The player hurts in the role of a ten-year boy, which extracts from home to become Pokemon coach. Pokemon are beings that you can make friends and sponsors. They can be kept by people and are to be found in the wild. In order to take up wild Pokemon into his own team, these must be captured by pokeball.
The green edition did not hit the market in Europe, instead published Nintendo here Pokemon Blue.
The player has different goals: That’s how he should "Best coaches" (Champ) become and must defeat the other Pokemon coaches of the region. True to the slogan "Get them all" In addition, as a whole Pokemon is to be caught: in the first editions a total of 151 pieces – including MEW, which was introduced by the developers after the test phase in the place released by removal of debugging tools. Because only certain Pokemon appear, players to resist the so-called Pokedex instructed to play with friends who own the other edition and swap prisoners Pokemon via Game-Link Cable.
On the 27th. February 1996 the games seem to appear in Japan – at a time when the interest in the seven-year-old Game Boy already began to decline. But the sales figures struck: alone in Japan, the first Pokemon generation games were sold over 10 million times a total of 10 million times; The refined game concept made itself paid. The original games had to fit 512 KB rough Game Paks and are written in GBZ80 Assembler. The games are also known for their many glitches that can be caused by different exploits, the most famous representative is the Missingno.-Glitch. A whole speedrun scene on Twitch and YouTube makes use of these programming errors. In Japan, a few months later, the version Pocket Monsters AO (blue) was published. Essentially, some errors were resolved and Pokemon sprites are bolted up. The Ubersee versions, Pokemon red and blue, colored on the US flag Stars and Stripes, based on this ie. The green edition was not published outside of Japan. In September 1998, the games seemed justified in North America.
How the games came to Germany
At this time, Patrick Roman Fabri is waiting for his first project at Nintendo of Europe in Grobostheim. "I just changed there and actually wanted to work on titles like Mario or Zelda as an avid player", says fabri. "My boss said, however: Pokemon becomes a rough topic. You should do that." The motivation with the games also grew the motivation: so obeded Fabri the core team to localize the games in German, French, Italian and Spanish, which also the translation of the animes, the gameguide and the spin-off title like Pokemon Stadium for coordinated the Nintendo 64.
Pokemon red and blue – Nintendo commercial (Source: Nintendo)
Also, the preparation of the promotional materials for the European market import, the support of merchandising partners and the organization of events to distribute special, not in the game of the game of the Pokemon, were coordinated in his then deployment department. "In the end, I am very proud of the work done, the games were amed excellently."
The localization process reminds Fabri as follows: "It started with the localization of the Pokemon name. That took almost exactly as long as the localization of the game texts." From the developers, the team received a description of about the Pokedex entry. "So there is a pokemon that has been described as soft, elastic and flufffig. We called it a pummeluff. At the meeting with the team in Japan we had to partially explain any words of the name of the named names." Some Pokemon were not allowed to be located, such as the flagship Pokemon Pikachu. "Pikachus voice in the first season of the German Pokemon series had to be post-synchronized, as they did not meet the ideas of the team from Japan. This shows how important Nintendo was this project."