Iwata: But in spite of that sluggish start, things ended up turning around significantly. What do you attribute that to? Iwata Asks
Ishihara: I think one reason is the power of word of mouth. In 1996, people weren't writing their own Internet blogs, but word steadily spread about how much fun Pokémon was. In addition, I strongly felt that the power of the media, centred around CoroCoro Comic7, served to accelerate the growth in Pokémon's popularity. Finally, there was also the small matter of Mew, the Pokémon that Morimoto-san contrived as a kind of prank...
7CoroCoro Comic is a monthly manga magazine aimed at primary school students first published in 1977 by Shogakukan. In addition to manga comic strips, it also features articles on hobbies and video games.
Morimoto: Well, I'm not sure if "contrived" is exactly the right word… (laughs wryly)
Ishihara: There's no denying that Mew's existence played an extremely significant role… Iwata Asks
Morimoto: We put Mew in right at the very end. The cartridge was really full and there wasn't room for much more on there. Then the debug features which weren't going to be included in the final version of the game were removed, creating a miniscule 300 bytes of free space. So we thought that we could slot Mew in there. What we did would be unthinkable nowadays!
Ishihara: This is in spite of being told after debug ended that you weren't to tamper with even a single bit! (laughs wryly)
Iwata: What's the point of going through all the trouble of the debug process if you're going to go and fiddle with the game afterwards…? I'd venture that this all came from Morimoto-san's mischievous nature.
Morimoto: Well, it was a prank that everyone right up to Tajiri-san was in on. But even though Mew was in there…
Iwata: …It wasn't actually supposed to appear in the game, right?
Morimoto: Right. Unless we could think about any good opportunity to do so, the existence of Mew wouldn't have been revealed to the public. It was left in there in case it was suitable for some post-launch activity. But if there wasn't anyone among ourselves who wanted to use it, I thought it would be fine to just leave it as it was.
Iwata: Mew could very well have ended up never appearing in the game.
Morimoto: Right. But then due to an unforeseen bug, Mew ended up appearing in some players' games. It looked like we planned all of this, but that wasn't the case. So although it caused all sorts of problems to many concerned, fortunately enough it ended up having a positive effect. Iwata Asks
Iwata: You can never predict how things are going to go, can you?
Morimoto: You really can't.
Iwata: That's how the "Legendary Pokémon Offer"8 came about.
8The "Legendary Pokémon Offer" was announced in the April 1996 edition of CoroCoro Comic. Twenty winners would be selected who could send their game cartridge in so that the Mew data would be uploaded onto it. There were approximately 78,000 entrants.
Morimoto: Right.
Iwata: There was a really incredible response to CoroCoro Comic's announcement of the Mew offer. I feel that's really when things turned round for Pokémon.
Ishihara: I believe so too. The monthly sales we'd had up to then began to be equalled by weekly sales, before increasing to become three then four times larger.
Iwata: I remember feeling that I'd never really witnessed a game selling like that before.
Ishihara: By the time it ranked number one in weekly sales, more than a year and a half had gone by since the game was first released.
Iwata: It's like the way traditional enka ballads explode in popularity only about a year and a half after they've been released. (laughs) (Editor's note: Enkas are melodramatic Japanese popular songs depicting the emotions and experience of Japanese people, with its distinctive singing style using tremolo.)
Ishihara: That's exactly what it was like! (laughs)
