Pokemon games are often criticized for their poor technical states these days, but the lack of refinement goes back to the series’ heyday. When remaking the OG Game Boy titles for the GBA, the devs at Game Freak had a rough time revisiting their previous work in part because the programming was so bad.
That’s according to a 2004 issue of Nintendo Dream magazine, which included an interview with director Junichi Masuda, lead planner Koji Nishino, lead programmer Tetsuya Watanabe, and graphics lead Takao Uno. That interview has recently been translated as part of a new DidYouKnowGaming video, offering some rare insight into the development of FireRed and LeafGreen.
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The original Game Boy titles were less than a decade old when the GBA remakes came around, but the devs still found it difficult to revisit them for their research, complaining that “there’s no color, the screen is too small, and the programming sucks.”
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The Japanese versions of those original games are even buggier than the localized versions, and Watanabe jokes that the team “hadn’t gotten any better at programming since then,” which is why they “desperately needed” Nintendo’s assistance to implement the then-new GBA Wireless Adapter. The late Satoru Iwata, who had recently become president of Nintendo, loaned a handful of programmers to Game Freak “for a few months” to help implement support for the accessory.
In this same interview, the devs also revealed that many of the changes added for FireRed and LeafGreen were built to help attract more girls and elderly players to the Pokemon series. In fact, development got underway with the slogan: “Pokemon that even 60-year-olds can play.” I’m not sure how many sexagenarians got into the games back then, but the continued stature of these remakes among fans speaks for itself.
Here are our definitive rankings of the best Pokemon games.
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