Pokémon Quiz
The first Pokémon ever drawn is not the one on the posters.
A Pokémon quiz with answers about how the series was made: the first games, the names, the designers and one secret creature hidden in the code. It stays with the original generation, so nothing from newer games is spoiled.
Did you know?
- Pikachu was not planned as the mascot. In the early days the pink, fairy-like Clefairy was the favourite for that role. The television series chose the yellow mouse instead, partly because it appealed to both boys and girls and because yellow is easy to recognise from a distance.
- Some English names are simple tricks. The snake Pokémon Ekans is 'snake' spelled backwards, and its evolved form Arbok is 'kobra' reversed. Translators had to invent 151 names quickly, each short enough to fit the game's ten-letter limit on screen.
- The hero's rival in the first games is named after another famous figure. In Japanese he is called Shigeru, after Shigeru Miyamoto, the Nintendo designer who advised Tajiri during development and suggested releasing the game in more than one version.
How the first Pokémon games were made
Pokémon was created by Game Freak, a company that began in the 1980s as a hand-stapled fan magazine about arcade games written by Satoshi Tajiri and illustrated by Ken Sugimori. The team turned to making games in 1989. Their creature-collecting project took about six years to finish, far longer than planned, and came close to bankrupting the studio before it finally reached Japanese shops in February 1996. It had first been pitched to Nintendo in 1990 under the title Capsule Monsters, a name that was changed during development.
Trading as the core idea
By 1996 the Game Boy was an ageing machine, and few people expected a new hit on it. The games' central trick was the link cable. Each version was missing some creatures that only the other one contained, so finishing the collection of 151 meant finding a friend and swapping. Early sales were modest, but word spread through schoolyards, and the games kept selling steadily for years instead of fading after a few weeks.
From a game to a franchise
A trading card game followed in Japan in October 1996 and an animated television series in April 1997. The hero of the series is called Satoshi in Japanese, after the creator, and Ash in English. To manage the growing brand, Nintendo, Game Freak and a third firm, Creatures, jointly set up what is now The Pokémon Company in 1998, the same year the games reached North America.
Names in many languages
Unlike most games of the time, Pokémon had its creature names rewritten for each market instead of being left in Japanese. Translators invented new puns in English, French, German and other languages, so the same creature can have several quite different names around the world. Only a few, including the yellow mascot, kept one name everywhere, a decision that later made that character easier to market globally.