In 1995 Pokemon Red and Green hit the shelves of Japanese Game stores... More than 8 years later Pokemon is still going as strong as ever and is currently the best selling Games Series and Games Franchise ever, not to mention the most popular.
Pokemon started life out as Capsule Monsters, an idea cooked up by Satoshi Tajiri when he was just a little school kid. Tajiri-san is and always was bug-mad and came up with a game where you caught bugs. This idea expanded to battling as well as raising these bugs before the expansion to a whole variety of monsters came about.
In 1975 Capsule Monsters was released in Manga Form, although it was un-noticed and unsuccessful it did give Tajiri the stepping stone to teaming up with Ken Sugimori, the dude behind the Pokemon we know and love.... and also co-founder with Tajiri of Gamefreak.
Gamefreak has had little non-pokemon projects, the most famous being the Gameboy Camera which actually contained Pokemon Green Sprites of Pikachu, Meowth, Mew, Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle. In the early nineties Capsule Monsters was suggested to Nintendo and at first it wasn't picked up.
It was Shigeru Miyamoto, the Nintendo Games Guru and genius that pushed Capsule Monsters through, a friendship forming between himself and Tajiri.
When Gamefreak finally came around to making Red and Green they had changed the name to Poketto Monsutta, or Pokemon as we know it. The emphasis was not only on battling, but on raising your Pokemon and the prospect of being able to play around with 150 different kinds blew open the possibilities for unique strategies and teams.
Before Pokemon the Gameboy Linking had been so criminally underused it's surprising the thing was kept. With Pokemon though the whole concept exploded into the public and sales of the link-cables QUADRUPLED.
People could link up to trade their hand-raised monsters or to duke it out and people lapped it up.
HOWEVER, Pokemon Red and Green were terrible games. Not in gameplay, not even in sound or lastibility... but because they were graphically inept, even for 1995 on the monochrome Gameboy and buggy as hell. Gamefreak's inexperience was to blame for this but it was something they rectified as the American market came calling for the Pokemon miracle.
Pokemon Red and Blue were released in America in 1998, losing Venusaur and sporting Blastoise and Charizard as the two mascots instead. They were instant hits and doubled the sale of Gameboys in the States. In 1999, Pokemon finally was released in Europe and the UK with most of the rest of the world following.
Pokemon Blue was released within Japan too as a remake of the originals and sold fairly well for a game that was almost the same as the other two released not too long before.
from pokecharms
