Game Freak was in trouble.
Sure, it was a good kind of trouble, but that didn't make the company's situation any easier.
A year ago, the tiny studio had been almost completely invisible, their contributions
to gaming overlooked by the masses.
Now, with the success of Pokémon Red and Green, they were a national icon, as gamers
all across Japan called out desperately for more games in the series.
With such a pressing demand for new titles, Game Freak were in danger of being swallowed
up by their workload.
They had so many different game projects in the works that it was hard to keep track of
them.
Remastered versions of their original hits, the Nintendo 64 game, and two brand new sequels
for the Gameboy Color were all in development – not to mention Nintendo's insistence
that the company translate their original games into new languages for a global market.
In the midst of all this work, though, Game Freak still remained the same small group
of friends that it had been a year ago.
The entire team only had four programmers, and there was no way they could manage to
get all of these projects finished to a high standard.
Was Game Freak's first taste of genuine success going to spell the end for the struggling
developers?
Then, just as things look bleak, and the team began wondering if they'd ever finish all
their work, a hero emerged.
He wasn't an employee of Game Freak.
He wasn't even an employee of Nintendo.
But in Pokémon's darkest hour, one man rescued Satoshi Tajiri's struggling company,
fixed up holes in multiple doomed projects, and set Game Freak on the path to global stardom.
This is the story of how Satoru Iwata saved Pokémon.
When Pokémon Red and Green finally hit store shelves, the team at Game Freak breathed a
sigh of relief.
Their masterpiece was finished.
Sure, it wasn't particularly pretty, its code was a mess, and it hadn't been as thoroughly
bug tested as it could have been, but they'd done it.
Five years of hard work was over.
Except, having taken so long to finally complete the games, there was a sense within Game Freak
that their little roleplaying game was already obsolete.
Game Freak had moved into games development the year that the original Game Boy was released,
but after five years of delays, Pokémon had finally debuted at a time when sales for the
handheld were virtually non-existent.
It seemed that the Game Boy was more or less finished by this time, and Game Freak's
monster trading simulators simply weren't in demand.
In spite of this, work began on a pair of sequels.
Game Freak had been forced to postpone plenty of fun ideas while working on their first
two Pokémon games, and the team were eager to put all of these plans to good use.
This work continued, even as reports of low sales began to arrive.
The game failed to scrape its way into the top ten bestseller chart for Gameboy games,
and it seemed that their original labor of love was going to go down as an obscure footnote
on the history of the handheld console.
But, the team reasoned, at least they'd made something they were proud of.
Then, unexpectedly, sales of Pokémon games began to skyrocket.
Searching for a reason, the team realized that a joke, snuck in at the last minute by
programmer Shigeki Morimoto, was causing an unusual buzz within the game's small community
of fans.
Shigeki really shouldn't have messed around with the game's code after he'd finished
bug testing.
It went against every rule of programming to try sneaking in additional Easter Eggs
after the Quality Assurance tests were complete.
But Shigeki thought that his inclusion, an additional secret Pokémon called Mew, was
a fun way to use up some extra space on the cartridge.
Besides, what was the worst that could happen?
However, even though Mew was completely uncatchable under normal circumstances, as players explored
the games, this little character began popping up, seemingly at random.
As it turned out, Pokémon Red and Green could have really done with some more strict error
testing – and not just because Shigeki had been messing around with a last minute Pokémon.
The games were filled to the brim with unintended glitches, which did everything from warping
players across the map, to generating impossibly powerful opponents.
In circumstances that players didn't entirely understand, some of these glitches would produce
a battle with Shigeki's secret Pokémon.
This led to rampant speculation and urban legends that bounced between Pokémon players,
as everyone tried to find the hidden wonders that the games held.
And so, in order to make the most of their newfound accidental popularity, Game Freak
announced a competition, in which winners could send in their Pokémon cartridges to
receive an official copy of Mew, the secret, hidden final creature within the game.
This plan worked spectacularly, as fan buzz grew loud, prompting more and more gamers
to rush out and buy copies of Pokémon.
After over a year on the market, the pair of original games finally topped the bestseller
charts in Japan.
The game had earned the success it deserved.
But there was a problem.
One which could potentially engulf the entire studio.
With the Pokémon fanbase growing so rapidly, demand for new games was getting to fever
pitch.
The team was ambitious about what they wanted to include in Gold and Silver, the follow-on
titles for the series.
They envisioned these two games as the pinnacle of everything that they'd done over the
past six years, fixing the faults within the original formula, and packing a huge amount
of new gameplay elements into the titles.
Except, these weren't the only games that the company had to work on.
The popularity of Red and Green justified a new, updated version of the original titles
that didn't feature as many bugs, and that that boasted better artwork and smoother gameplay.
Meanwhile, the team were also hard at work producing a Pokémon game for the Nintendo
64 – this more graphically impressive title would link up with the Gameboy games, if only
Game Freak could get it to work.
All the while, Nintendo were pressuring Game Freak to translate Red and Green into English
and other European languages, in order to take the Pokémon brand global.
Several of these projects seemed completely impossible, for one big reason: under the
hood, the Pokémon games' inner workings were impenetrable.
The code for the original Pokémon games was an absolute mess, having been cobbled together
over five years, without any documentation.
Shigeki and his fellow programmers had thrown it together in a very haphazard fashion, to
the point that unless you were one of Game Freak's four coders, you wouldn't have
the first clue how to interpret any of it, or how any of the pieces related to each other.
With such a confusing, convoluted code underpinning the Pokémon games, nobody but the core team
at Game Freak could help with programming new titles.
This meant that for every day spent working on the updated Pokémon Blue, the game's
sequels, Gold and Silver, was delayed by another day.
The team wanted nothing more than to finish their magnum opus, but with so many distractions
and side projects, there was a danger that everything that Game Freak had built would
end up crumbling around their ears.
Facing mounting pressure from fans and Nintendo alike, the team began trying to justify the
cancellation of some projects – in particular, the worldwide release of Pokémon.
Game Freak found itself in the odd position of trying to talk down their big hit, claiming
that it simply wouldn't appeal to Western audiences.
But Nintendo would not be dissuaded.
Game Freak needed to translate Pokémon Red and Green.
They also needed to rewrite the game's entire code to work on the Nintendo 64 for the Pokémon
Stadium spin-off.
Plus, they needed to finish their incredibly ambitious sequels, Pokémon Gold and Silver
– and they needed to do so as soon as possible to capitalize on the success of their original
games.
Failure on any of these projects risked dooming the Pokémon series, and bursting the bubble
of popularity that had engulfed Japan.
But there was no solution which would save the day.
Game Freak couldn't work faster, and Nintendo programmers couldn't decipher their code.
The small team was stuck.
Just when all hope seemed lost, Satoru Iwata entered the fray, rolled up his sleeves, and
bailed Game Freak out.
Satoru Iwata was not an employee at Game Freak.
He wasn't an employee of Nintendo either – instead, he was the president of a company
called HAL Laboratory.
This company had worked closely with Nintendo on a series of games, so Satoru had a chair
in key board meetings, and had been keeping an eye on Game Freak for a long time.
Satoru hadn't always been HAL's president, though.
When he'd started with the company, years ago, he'd been a hotshot programmer, writing
code for a number of key games that had helped the company establish itself.
So when Satoru piped up in a board meeting, offering his services to help deciphering
Game Freak's code and taking care of their localization work, he wasn't volunteering
his company.
He was happy and willing to put his own skills to the test by trying to figure out how Pokémon
Red and Green fit together.
While many were dubious that Satoru would have the time and ability to commit to such
a big project, he was given a copy of the game's code to pore over.
If the president of HAL thought he could fix the problem that four professional coders
couldn't figure out, he was welcome to try.
And so, Satoru read through the code.
He made notes on it, learned how it fit together, and, before long, had completely understood
what was going on.
Nintendo sent a representative to check on Satoru's progress, if only to see whether
they'd need to assign the localization tasks to someone else.
Satoru smiled as he showed off his progress, and talked long into the night as he discussed
what he'd done with the code, what was left to do in localizing the games, and how he'd
organized and structured his work so that others could leap in and begin the task of
translating Pokémon for a wider audience.
But Satoru didn't stop there.
Having helped guide the Pokémon localization project, he set his sights on the second big
challenge he knew that Game Freak was facing: the problem of rebuilding Pokémon Red and
Green's battle mechanic in Nintendo 64 architecture.
This had been a particularly huge problem for Game Freak, as their code had, in all
fairness, only barely fit together on Gameboy hardware.
Unpacking and reworking the entire combat system seemed like an impossible task.
It was all the more impressive, then, that Satoru Iwata managed to complete the entire
conversion process in a single week.
Everyone was astounded, not least programmer Shigeki Morimoto, who'd spent months building
the original battle system.
When he heard that Satoru has learned, restructured, and fixed their broken code, he exclaimed,
"What kind of president is this?!"
With two of their biggest problems out of the way, Game Freak's programmers got a
little greedy.
They started wondering what other enormous problems Satoru could fix for them.
The president happily looked over their code and created an image compression system which
saved a phenomenal amount of data, meaning that the team could make the most of space
in future Pokémon games.
In spite of being besieged by requests, Satoru didn't mind at all.
He was thrilled at the success that the Pokémon series had achieved, and in his mind, if he
could handle some of the big challenges to the various side projects that Game Freak
were working on, without disrupting the team's flow too much, that would help them to make
Pokémon Gold and Silver the best games they could possibly be.
And so, thanks to Satoru Iwata's help, the Pokémon series launched around the world.
Pokémon Red and Blue became enormous hits on many continents, disproving Game Freak's
earlier claims that they wouldn't do well outside of Japan.
Similarly, Pokémon Stadium on the Nintendo 64 was released in Japan to thunderous success.
A follow up game was released worldwide, helping to further boost the appeal of the series.
Then, finally, after three years of intense work, Pokémon Gold and Silver were finished.
These games lived up to their creators' expectations, introducing new gameplay elements,
more detailed sprites, color graphics, and a map that was twice the size of the original
game.
All of these achievements were only possible thanks to Satoru Iwata's help.
While he had nothing personal to gain from helping Game Freak with their challenge, Satoru
had gladly stepped in to fix the problems that the team had been struggling with, and
their combined successes saw Pokémon go on to critical acclaim around the world, inspiring
an entire generation of gamers.
And as for the moral of this story?
It's good to share.
We all have different skills and techniques.
We all have something to contribute, and when we tackle projects together, we're able
to make something wonderful.
Maybe, like Satoru Iwata, you might currently find yourself in a work or school environment
that doesn't make the best use of all of your skills.
You might have other talents that are being overlooked by those around you.
If that's the case, follow Satoru's example.
Go out of your way to find opportunities to practice the things that matter to you.
If you can't do it during your average day, try to find time to put your talents to work.
Somewhere out there, you'll find people who appreciate what you're good at.
Because, at the end of the day, we're all more successful when we work together.
Just like playing Pokémon.
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