Sponsored: Pokemon Pulling Out All the Stops for 20 Year Anniversary
It’s hard to believe, but it has actually been 20 long years since the release of the original pair of Pokémon games, Red and Blue. What began with 150 (151 if you count the Mew cheat, 152 with the legendary Mssngno. glitch) has ballooned into a whopping 721. The original pair of Pokémon games were released for the original 8-bit Game Boy system in Japan in 1996. Of course, it would be another two years before the games made their way to the North America in 1998, but plenty of people were importing the titles before then.
While it was expected to be popular, few could have predicted the full-fledged industry that sprouted around the franchise that includes cartoons, card games, multiple spin-off titles and toys galore. The franchise has made billions of dollars and is among the highest-selling role playing games of all time.
For the 20th anniversary, Nintendo and the Pokémon company are pulling out all the stops with new games, Amiibos, trading cards, a Super Bowl ad and more all set to be released this year. Among them will be the franchise’s first offering for mobile devices, Pokémon Go. The game is set to be an augmented reality title and will be used in conjunction with an additional device that notifies players when a Pokémon is near to their real-life location. The player can then use the game on their phone (through the camera) to capture the real-life monsters and train them just like in the game. It’ll be a free-to-play title, though it’s expected it will support in-app purchases.
The advent of Pokémon on mobile platforms is going to be a big deal, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Pokémon series has long been a true innovator among games and it’s hard to imagine what the landscape of modern gaming would be like without the impact of the franchise. One way the series drastically changed the way we game today was its introduction of addictive minigames through the ubiquitous Game Corners, which have appeared since the beginning of the series.
The Game Corner (originally appearing in Celadon City in Pokémon Red and Blue) has been a minigame staple of the franchise since its inception. The Pokéslots have been a classic way to waste time while you waste time, and they helped to make minigames in RPGs the standard as opposed to the exception. In fact, the slot games were the only way to earn certain Pokémon, particularly Porygon, the digital Pokémon made entirely of programming code. The incorporation of slot based minigames mirrors the concepts behind modern online social casinos that provide various themed games and prizes for players looking for a break from their typical games. The slots from the original RPGs also appear in spin-off titles such as Pokémon Colosseum and Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness. They even make cameo appearances in the TV series and are used as educational tools during Professor Oak’s Pokémon Lecture segments.
Additionally, there are rumours that the long-awaited Pokémon Z will be released this February. The follow-up to the most recent pair of games (Pokémon X and Y) is supposed to take place three years after the events of X and Y. It’s set in an entirely new region called Ampardo, which is said to have a pronounced Spanish influence.
With little more than a month before the supposed release of the games, we expect a lot more information to trickle down concerning the sequels. At the very least, we expect much to be revealed in the series’ advertisement during the Super Bowl on February 7. Get ready to “catch ’em all,” because the year of the Pokémon is officially upon us.
