Pokémon Yellow

About this game

Pokémon Yellow went on sale in Japan in September 1998, two years after Red and Green. Game Freak made it, Satoshi Tajiri directed it, and Junichi Masuda wrote the music. North America got it in October 1999, and Europe in June 2000.

The Story Behind

In Japan the game came first. Red and Green went on sale on February 27, 1996, and the cartoon did not start until April 1, 1997 — more than a year later. Japanese children met Pokémon as something you bought in a shop and traded with the boy sitting next to you.

Everywhere else it happened the other way round. The English dub of the cartoon began on September 8, 1998, and the games followed three weeks later, on September 28. Germany did the same: cartoon on September 1, 1999, games five weeks after. Britain left a wider gap still, with the cartoon in March 1999 and the games in October. Gail Tilden, who ran the launch at Nintendo of America, has said the company argued internally over whether to carry Pokémon across as it was or rebuild it for the West. Minoru Arakawa, then president of Nintendo of America, decided to keep it as it was.

So when Yellow reached North America in October 1999, it was sold to children who already knew Ash and Pikachu from television. In Japan it had been the opposite.

Japan had already seen a craze of this shape once. In August 1985 Lotte started putting Devil-versus-Angel stickers inside chocolate wafers called Bikkuriman. By 1988 the country was buying roughly four hundred million of them a year. Shops put up signs limiting customers to three. Children bought the chocolate for the sticker and left the chocolate behind. There were thefts, and there was bullying over the rare ones, and the Japan Fair Trade Commission said in public that the way rare stickers were packed left room to suspect gambling. Lotte stopped the series in 1992.

Tricks & Tales

Pikachu's friendship in Yellow is a hidden value from 0 to 255 that starts at 90. Walking 255 steps with him in the lead can raise it; leveling him up or giving medicine raises it; letting him faint or trading him away lowers it. Talk to him in the overworld and his pop-up face changes with that number — the franchise's friendship mechanic was born here, attached to one Pikachu. You start with Pikachu instead of choosing a starter, but all three classic starters can still be obtained from NPCs during the game; the Squirtle comes from Officer Jenny, nodding to the anime's Squirtle Squad. And this Pikachu cannot evolve into Raichu, mirroring Ash's Pikachu refusing to evolve in the show.

The game underneath this one took six years to make, and the people making it thought they were going to be too late. ‘That's why I had this feeling that perhaps we were going to miss the last train,’ the producer Tsunekazu Ishihara said in a Nintendo interview years afterwards. Satoru Iwata, sitting with him, gave the reason plainly: by then there was a sense in the air that the Game Boy had reached the end of its shelf life. They had actually finished in October, missed the end-of-year selling season, and had to go out at the end of February instead — in Ishihara's words, the very worst time of year to release games.

Junichi Masuda, who wrote Yellow's music, had been through the worst of it. ‘At one point we had a crisis after all the programmers quit at once,’ he told Famitsu in 2019. He taught himself to program rather than lose work that was nearly done. The hardest part, he said, was the capacity limit. Names could only be five letters. A Pokémon could only carry four moves. The map had to be cut into separate areas.

By the end the cartridge was completely full. Shigeki Morimoto took out the debugging tools, which left about three hundred bytes free, and he put Mew in there. In April 1996 the magazine CoroCoro Comic offered that Mew to readers who wrote in. About seventy-eight thousand of them did, and Ishihara has said the sales went up three or four times over.