A lot of y'all like to read developers interviews in-full and in text form, and making them publicly available is also good for preservationist purposes. So here's links to three of our translations, totalling about 25 pages. These were originally posted on Dr Lava's Patreon, and have now been made public on his website. Dr Lava is a DYKG member, and he wrote this video. Links: 1. All nine Game Freak developers in 1996 Pokedex book: lavacutcontent.com/satoshi-tajiri-pokedex-interview 2. Satoshi Tajiri and Tsunekazu Ishihara in Nintendo Online Magazine, July 2000 issue: lavacutcontent.com/tajiri-tsunekazu-ishihara-interview/ 3. Junichi Masuda in Famitsu Weekly, May 2019: lavacutcontent.com/masuda-game-freak-history/ 4. Five Game Freak developers, Nintendo Online Magazine, July 2000 issue: lavacutcontent.com/sugimori-masuda-developer-interview/ (we already published this one last year, but we briefly mentioned it in today's video, so we're linking it here along with the others) These interview translations add up to 25 pages, but there's still about 80 pages we mentioned in this video but haven't published yet. We're still holding them back to use as research for future videos, then we'll publish them in text form at a later date. Cheers.

There's actually a lot of parallels between that concept and randomizers today, only that randomizers are almost entirely meant as a challenge and not nearly as casual as the games themselves

The early ideas about buying and selling pokemon make sense when you consider the inspiration the games took from capsule toys, especially in earlier iterations.

This may explain why there's mention in the code of Yellow of an unused Pink version. Bumping up the gen 1 game count to four brings the total far closer to that original hope for 5-7 before it was compromised at two. RIP Pokemon Pink.

That moment when you realize Game Freak came up with the idea of randomizers and Nuzlockes over a decade before anyone else.

Considering how bugged the original games were, this would probably have been a nightmare to actually play. I can imagine the randomizer putting a gym entrance behind a rock, just completely ruining that entire save file.

A procedurally generated world based on your trainer ID sounds incredible, ngl

Thanks for having me on! I love learning and explaining things like this. :)

The more I hear about Gen 1's development, the more I realize its success was lightning in a bottle.

Imagine being the strategy guide companies of the time and the sense of existential dread when they would have begun to realize that each game was slightly different and they slowly meltdown. That would have been a nightmare.

If they had just dropped the randomized landscapes bit, I feel like the trainer ID based randomization of possible Pokemon could've worked. All they would've needed to do is set larger pools of Pokemon for each area, and a set of predefined appearance rates to be randomly applied (Think having 10 potential Pokemon per area, but the developers only want 4 to appear, so the game randomly applies appearance rates of 40%, 25%, 20%, 15%, and six instances of 0% to the set of potential Pokemon based on your ID number). To determine the same number of Pokemon are unobtainable per game, you'd need to ensure two things. First, you'd need to determine a random set of Pokemon to be purposely excluded, with consistent rules on the size of evolutionary lines so some poor kid doesn't end up missing out on 15 Pokemon, while another ends up missing 5. Ideally they'd set it so a defacto "ban list" of Pokemon is generated on start, picked from sets defined by the size of their evolutionary lines (something like one Pokemon that doesn't evolve, two evolutionary lines with only one evolution, and two evolutionary line with two evolutions). Pokemon on this "ban list" would always be given one of the 0% chance slots before the rest are randomly distributed. Second, they'd need to implement a system so the base form of each non-banned evolutionary line appears at least once. My preferred solution to this problem is giving each non-evolved Pokemon a value during the intialization process based on how many pools they have left to appear in. The easiest way to do that is hardcode the amount of pools they are in, and have the game decrease that value by one every time they receive an appearance rate of 0%. If that value reaches 1, they're guaranteed to recieve the highest value available in a pre-randomization step similar to the banlist check. During that pre-randomization step, it would also determine if the amount of Pokemon designated 1 pool remaining is higher than the total number of non-zero appearance rates in the pool. If that ends up being the case then the game repeatedly divides the largest appearance rate by two until all of the Pokemon can receive appearance values. Another solution involves using Cerulean Cave as an overflow pool, where a similar tally system keeps track if base evolutions aren't included in any pool, but instead of forcing them to be in their last possible opportunity, it just adds them to the otherwise nearly empty set that is Cerulean Cave. Spawn rates would be determined by dividing 100% by the total number of Pokemon in the pool. I personally dislike this solution because I feel like it would be less satisfying to players if all the Pokemon they couldn't find showed up in the post game, but it would trim down the algorithm to determine pool contents. As for how you handle the game calculating all that on startup, you hide it behind the intro with Professor Oak. Remove the player's ability to mash through the intro, giving the cartridge time and computational power to intialize all of the game settings as otherwise the game is just retrieving and rendering text information.

replayability would be greater, and 30 years later when streaming became a thing it would have been better. but at the time, the playground talk of how to get past a cave or navigate safari zone, or where zapdos was, or the hidden area behind bills house, or the ss Anne truck.. those things would have never been.

If he had just scaled the idea down to the trainer ID changing the availability of certain Pokémon in a given route and weighing the encounter rates. That would have been neat. Say, across three games. One guy can barely find Seel in Seafoam, one finds them all the time, and another finds Shellder at Seafoam rarely but finds lots of Seel while surfing the ocean!

These videos are getting better and better. A lot of channels give pokemon facts but these deeper dive videos are so much more interesting! Another great one guys 👍

I love it how many of the features game freak worked on the hardest were probably ditched out from the final release or overlooked by most players, whereas features they probably didn’t focus on as much like multiplayer battling were crucial for the health of the future series. I would love to know how developers envisioned player experience of the Pokémon world. It probably differed a lot from ours

Can you imagine the amount of replay-ability! Gosh, I'm so sad they couldn't figure out the recursive nature of random world building. It could have even been built while you were talking to Prof. Oak, so it wouldn't feel like you were waiting for it to load.

It actually wouldn't have been that hard to set things up to have 2^16 different versions simply by having two different version for each zone. You basically make two Kantos that have all their 'doors' in the same places, and then each zone picks which version to use based on your trainer ID. Hell, for up to 16 zones you can just do it by checking a bit (and then check odd/even for pairs of bits after that. Now I kinda want to see if that can be done in a romhack.

Ok the fact that they scrapped blue version because venusaur has a super cool design is awesome to me, giving that family some love

Pretty wild that they started with concepts that would later become rather popular and standard for a lot of indie games like Procedural Generation and losing your progress or party members if they were knocked out (Permadeath). I really want to know if they are aware of "Nuzlockes" because that's basically what Tajiri almost made but officially lol.

One-time procedurally generated worlds would have been awesome. That would promote trading so much more than it does now, especially since they jumped ten different sharks to include alternate dimensions and timelines into the franchise. I really want that in a game now.

A Pokémon style rouge-like with randomly generated monsters sounds like a modern indie game concept. I'd play it

Wow, I can't believe they actually considered a "Pokemultiverse" of sorts back then! 🤯

Honestly they should try this again. With god knows how many Pokémon out there now each game could be so unique. It may not work but would be one hell of an experiment

Sounds like randomizers and nuzlockes were the fan-created spiritual successors to ideas early in Pokémon's development

So, initially I thought that it was to make more money by making two separate versions of the games- but this has made me realize that the concept started from a lot more of a passionate place. It's literally changed my concept on that. Maybe the means have changed and now it IS for money- but I like the idea where it came from initially.

Having randomized maps based on player ID sounds rad! Super ambitious so I see why they didn’t do it, but man that sounds really fun!

11:02 the damage status mechanic kind of came back in the games that had bonding like Sun and Moon where there would be text like “Pokémon looks like it’s about to cry.”

11:00 Madou Monogatari (predecessor of the Puyo Puyo series) did this several years in advance. It's an interesting enough concept, but I could see this being absolutely heartbreaking if players also had to surrender their 'mons when losing battles.

I really like the idea of a Pokemon having more RNG content. But instead of the whole game being different, it's just specific locations. Something similar to version exclusive stuff. Like one place could be a swamp, small town, dry rock desert/valley. Town gym being a different type or player starts in a different home town. Even Pokemon having alternate places to be found.

The first scrapped feature sounds like they wanted to make randomizers canon almost. Which makes sense as whenever I go to replay a Pokemon game I always randomize it.

The idea of not seeing HP numbers for opposing Pokemon reminds me of how it's done in D&D: _"He's looking pretty rough"_ and _"He looks hurt, but he's still standing and angry",_ etc

DYKG puts an insane amount of effort into these videos, and it really shows!

The idea of permanently loosing your Pokémon is……yeah….I’m glad they took that out. Like….yikes!

65,000 versions would have been insane. But I think old Pokémon games are usually replayable alone with the different amount of teams you can have. Like, I had teams that were different from each other. One play through was Venusaur, Mew, Golem, Dragonite, Vaporeon, and Electabuzz. And another was Blastoise, Jolteon, Aerodactyl, Exeggutor, Arcanine, and Mewtwo.

Dude, even just having what pokemon appear be randomized would've given so much more life to the trading feature. Imagine if you could only come across a third or even a fourth of all pokemon in any save file, and maybe only one of the legendary birds.

This would have turned the strategy guides into phone books...

Wow, this is fascinating! i LOVE all the love you've been giving Pokemon and it's so much fun as a fan since the Gen 1 era to be learning so much new and interesting history about the series' start! Also, THANK YOU for providing links to those translations!! I'm so excited to read those!

Well, this certainly has me brimming with curiosity as to what a randomly generated Pokemon game would be... a Rougemon...?

Great video, the research and work that went into this has paid off, love it!

Lovely video! I really like to see how dedicated you guys are to investigate and compile this info in an entertaining video.

So many cool facts here! It's interesting to think of how many of the ideas they threw out would go on to become core features / mechanics for other games. Their original idea of representing incoming damage with text like "That hurt!" or "That really hurt!" that they scrapped....that sounds a lot like how they keep teams updated on score during a Pokémon Unite match now. :D Thanks so much for all your efforts in uncovering Pokémon history!!

I love how deep you guys dig to uncover interesting and new facts of our favorite games for your videos ♥️♥️♥️ Great job!!!

The Menko Card, play-for-keeps idea reminds of Magic's early Ante system. It's funny how that was considered a fun way to elevate the stakes in what is now considered almost entirely archaic game design

I’m impressed how you guys are still able to dig up new info on these extremely popular games. Props to you all, it’s been a great 10 years

This is honestly amazing. I kinda wish/hope they would revive some of these monumentally different ideas for how the games function, considering how stale the games have been mechanically lately. Like even just buying and selling Pokémon sounds like it could be a really neat gimmick

I think they should try the every copy is personalized thing sometime maybe for either Gen 10 or the Gen 5 remakes / B3W3 and see how it goes

Just remember that 16 pairs of differences allow for 65536 different version of the game altough most of it is still similar, it would ork way better than randomly generated land for a game like pokemon

Been a long time viewer. Really cool to see how you guys pivoted to exclusive stuff.

No wonder Nuzlockes fit Pokémon like a glove, the games were meant to be that way.

Oh man, Pokémon almost had Nuzlockes built into it

A personalized Pokémon Red and Blue map would of took ages to make, They probably were right to change that through it would of being cool when it was released by fans.

This is incredible. I would love to see this happen.

This is incredible info. Good work!

I would love to see someone make a romhack where if you lose the opponent takes one of your Pokemon (and you have to rematch against them with it) hm in retrospect the other way around is kind of like the system in Pokemon Colosseum?

Semi-random Pokemon appearances based on location, swapping town locations, item location, and "dungeon" location, with a final touch of swapping who are gym leaders, elite four, rival, and so on!

Funnily enough, I had an idea a few months ago where all Regional Dex Pokemon could be found normally in the wild, and the remaining National Dex Pokemon would appear in the postgame but the only ones you can get under normal circumstances are randomly decided based off of your Trainer ID.

If the game was going to have the "you lose i take away one of your pokemons" idea, AND make you able to take from others, this means that Nuzlockes would've gotten easier as you could've simply grabbed the best pokemons from the enemy team, losing to the enemies wouldn't change anything since you'd get a game over anyways

This was fascinating. Just thinking about how different the franchise would've been if some of these concepts would've stuck around is wild. Also wondering if the "Buying Pokemon" mechanic would've ended up being closely inspired by the Capsule Monsters concept and ended up being a Gacha game. Ngl I think it would be cool if they revisited these ideas, would be cool

Huge fun and really appreciate the work money and time that goes into these History videos! Thank you for preserving Pokemon History

This was really interesting! Thanks for being a real one dykg!

It's so interesting to think about this game's development. Six years, "twists and turns", based on a bug collector's dream, and they might have known they had a good idea, but I don't think they realized that one day "Pocket Monsters" would morph into the largest multimedia company on the planet. They sure knew they had something, though. And you have to give credit to Nintendo themselves, for funding and helping cultivate a masterpiece of a game.

The whole concept of a unique, randomised map for almost every copy of the game sounds awfully similar to the ‘every copy of Super Mario 64 is personalised’ legend. Red and Green originally released in Japan in 1996. Guess which other game also first released in 1996?

I think a way they could have done it without actually fully randomising it would be to divide the routes and dungeons into 16 different areas (e.g. route 3/mt moon/route 4 could be one block), and then have two variations of each, with each bit of the trainer ID corresponding to which variant is selected for each of the areas.

Kind of amazing to hear about a concept of every game being different based on the Trainer ID, since in the modern day, the series gets a ton of flak for having two different versions with next to no differences. With the sheer number of Pokemon available now, players could have gotten a lot of mileage out of games that swapped out many different Mons - for example, your game's typical Bird type changing between Pidgey, Spearow, Hoothoot, Natu, Taillow, Wingull, Starly, Pidove, Rufflet, Fletchling, Pikipek, or Rookidee. And after beating the Elite 4 or post-game, have certain regions change up what's available where, reshuffling them once a day after speaking to a certain character or something. Alas, that was not to be.

I love hearing about developers thoughts on a game and about interesting concepts that could have made it into the game and what that game might have been like with that content in it.

They settled on a winning formula, but I wish they took more risks and explored different ideas and game directions, a lot of these concepts sound neat

Thanks for going the extra mile to make great content!

One of my favorite thing about the Pokémon games I really like is how you find NPCs in-game that talk to you about how important not just looking at a Pokémon’s strength is, instead of getting hung up on the competitive stats. They know that most people that play these games focus most on doing the most effective, speedy moves, but the casual part of Pokémon is just as interesting.

Damn. Whole game was almost a nuzlocke.

This channel is a gift we do not deserve. Thank you.

"We used texts to represent different statuses." *getting hit by a Gen 1 freeze* EMOTIONAL DAMAGE!

Good stuff, thanks for the hard work.

So ...The concept of randomizer was already in mind before the randomizer community did their own? Wow

Wow there at the end, sounds like they had nuzlock like mechanics planned, and can't believe battling in general wasn't intended at all, I don't like the competitive scene, but to imagine Pokemon without battles in genral seems odd, I wonder what that would look like, is that what would inspire the features like Pokemon Amie later on?

So Nuzlocks were essentially the first concept for Pokemon? That may also explain why certain themes seem to play out more heavily in gen 1 that lead to fan theories such as "Gary's Raticate". There may have been concepts that subconsciously made their way into the games based on that original thought process.

You guys are doing amazing work! Keep it up!

*DidYouKnowGaming* is without a doubt, a youtube channel

DYKG went from stating facts from obscure to common knowledge, to uncovering the long lost past and solving myths.

I love the idea that if you lose a battle you could lose Pokémon in your party. Maybe make it so you could protect 1 or 2, but the rest are up for grabs if you lost

Just imagine playing your copy of pokemon back in the day and everyone had different random encounters and someone found a random mew in the wild before the day of randomizers that would be cool

They made nuzlocks before it was cool lol

They should have done this with 2 different kantos for the 2 versions sothat red and green would be different, red has our kanto, green has a different kanto with the Pokemon you can’t find in red. This would make the games infinitely more replay able.

To me, there's no other game that's as technically unique as pokemon; each game having their own unique ID's that determine wild encounters, being able to battle and trade with other people, and being able to transfer pokemon from previous generation consoles.

I like how they took the procedurally generated idea and used it for the Mystery Dungeon Series.

I'm not gonna lie when I heard Lockstin say GameGreak originally planned for every copy of Pokémon Red, Blue and Green to be unique to each player I thought it was a joke and a nod to the "Every copy of Mario 64 is personalized" Iceberg meme.

As a developer myself, all I can say is that this would have been a QA nightmare, and a ton of pressure on devs to think through so many possible scenarios, landscapes, and other unintended bugs that could possibly happen.

Man I was just thinking the other day how cool it would be if there was *official* variation on randomizers. My idea is that the game can draw from a pool of all available Pokemon, but only 150 would show up, and always in certain parameters. The basic idea is that, for instance, if the official game was just FireRed, one of the possibilities would be that Mareep takes the place of Pidgey and, idk, Munchlax takes the place of Rattata. So on route 1 where's the 50% chance of running into Pidgey or Rattata, now there's a 50% chance of either Mareep or Munchlax, and on every following instance where there was originally a Pidgey or Rattata, now there's Mareep or Munchlax. But in all possible randomized versions of the game, there's only a set of like 8 Pokemon that could replace Pidgey, and a different set of 8 that would replace Rattata, so it's not like the randomizer you can find online where you can have literally anything replace them. I just really want a Mareep from the beginning of the game.

Red & Green, then Blue... then Red & Blue and then yellow.... Man wasn't able to make 7 versions like he wanted.... but he made 6.... and that's pretty awesome...

It would be insane to have a gen1 remake that is exactly like the og were planned (and better graphics, at least gen3 level of graphics)

Can you imagine having to buy 7 different versions of Pokémon instead of 2? Parents would've been mortgaging their home just to catch 'em all.😱

I could see the gym leaders in each city being randomized, or the trainer slots in each route

They originally intended for you to loose your Pokemon once you lost? Little did they know fans would eventually come up with Nuzlocke challenges to do exactly that xD Plus, the fact that they originally basically wanted the game to work in a way similar to what the Randomizers do now is also pretty interesting.

"every copy of pokemon is personalized" doesnt exist, it cant hurt you "every copy of pokemon is personalized" :

Pretty neat to know how things could've turned out! But I also like a lot of what we have today. Thanks for uploading!

I kinda realise that Dragon Quest 9 of all things did something like this In the game, you get harvesting spots that let you collect amounts of certain items, and the amount of items each spot can max out at varies from playthrough to playthrough. But the game has a feature where you can join the party of another player through DS link play, and in their worlds, you get a different amount of items that you can collect.

I kinda want to see the idea of having your Pokémon stolen after losing a battle come back in some way. Maybe having a rival or other antagonist character come and steal 1 or 2 of your Pokémon after you lose to them and eventually getting the ability to take the stolen Pokémon back in the end/postgame could work.

Ya really had to do the "every copy is personalized" shtick, even if it was real huh?

This is come cool info! Thanks for all your hard work.

Interesting...I was just thinking about a gen 1 randomizer, but more just the path you take in the game.

apparently there's 10 million different colours so 65000 verisons of Pokemon should be easy