When Pokémon (as Pocket Monsters) launched in Japan in 1996, it did not arrive as a single game. The initial releases were Pokémon Red and Green, with Pokémon Blue following later as a refined version featuring improved graphics, updated character sprites, and corrections to various bugs.
The concept behind the games was inspired by the childhood hobby of bug collecting.
The Pokédex in Red and Blue holds exactly 151 Pokémon, with the elusive and powerful Mew at the end of the list. In North America, Mew was not obtainable through normal gameplay and required a cheating device such as a GameShark to access.
The glitch creature known as MissingNo. became one of the most talked-about bugs in gaming history. Encountered through a specific programming exploit, it could duplicate items and produce strange visual distortions across the screen. MissingNo. is not an intentional Pokémon but rather residual data left in the game’s code.
The soundtrack was composed primarily by Junichi Masuda, who produced some of gaming’s most enduring music despite working within the severe hardware constraints of the original Game Boy.
The player character is officially named Red. The rival, while customizable during play, is identified as Blue in later official media. The names Ash and Gary belong to the English-language anime adaptation rather than the games themselves.
A parked truck near the S.S. Anne gave rise to one of the era’s most persistent gaming rumors. Players convinced one another that Mew was hidden beneath it and could be reached somehow. The rumor was false, but it continued circulating even into later remakes of the games.
During development, the evolution lines for Butterfree and Venomoth were swapped from what shipped in the final game. Butterfree was originally intended to evolve from Venonat, while Metapod was planned as the pre-evolution for Venomoth.
Pikachu has become the undisputed face of the franchise, prominent across the anime, merchandise, and marketing. What most people do not know is that Clefairy was the original choice for Ash’s partner in the anime before that decision was reversed.
Pokémon Red and Blue remain the best-selling non-bundled Game Boy titles and rank among the best-selling role-playing games ever released, which is notable given that both games arrived near the end of the Game Boy’s commercial lifespan in the United States.
A lesser-known workaround in the Safari Zone allows players to enter without any money by repeatedly pressing the clerk until he eventually relents and grants entry with a single Safari Ball. The clerk frames it as a one-time exception, but the method can be repeated. This appears to be an intentional failsafe built into the game to prevent players from being permanently locked out of content due to having no funds.
The character Jynx drew criticism from journalists and commentators who argued that its original black-faced design resembled blackface imagery and was offensive to Black people. Game Freak later changed Jynx’s face color from black to purple in subsequent releases.
Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee are named after real martial artists. In international versions, the references are to Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee respectively. In the original Japanese versions, their names pay tribute to Edihara, a boxer, and Sawamura, a kickboxer.
Kadabra became the subject of a lawsuit in 2000 when the psychic and self-described telekineticist Uri Geller filed a claim against Nintendo for one hundred million dollars, arguing the character was modeled after him and incorporated anti-Semitic imagery. The lawsuit did not succeed in court, but it had lasting consequences for the trading card game. Reprints of the Kadabra card were halted, and the evolution line was quietly restructured so that Abra could evolve directly into Alakazam, bypassing Kadabra entirely.