February 27, 1996: Red Light! Green light!
by Diamond Feit
Prepare yourself for a shock: I've never cared much for the outdoors. I grew up fascinated by television and the rewards it offered me in the form of cartoons and video games. I seldom played sports, I cannot swim, and my first summer camp experience at 10 years old turned me off from ever sleeping in a tent again.
Yet thinking back on those days, I certainly spent a far greater percentage of my life outside than I do now. I walked to and from school for many years, a mile each way as I recall. My friends and I often played together in our respective backyards or even in nearby vacant lots; we called one patch of undeveloped land \"the woods\" even though it barely measured a fraction of an acre.
Comparatively, I feel like my kids today out-shut-in me by far thanks to the internet. They too walk to school but they otherwise entertain themselves exclusively indoors, watching online videos or chatting with friends\u2014sometimes both at the same time. We moved here thinking they'd make the most of the nearby public park but that was before smartphones took over. I love a good swing set but that's not going to win out over anime on demand.
I don't know whether my progeny represent the majority of kids today but I'm positive they're not all terminally online. Years of teaching in elementary schools and strolling through that aforementioned local park have shown me that certain outdoorsy traditions remain strong in our digital era. Specifically, kids love bugs and here in Japan there are plenty of distinct varieties to hunt down, capture, and store in clear plastic containers.
30 years ago\u2014presumably when these customs had even more pull\u2014one dedicated developer transformed his own childhood hobby of insect collecting into a handheld game. His dream project arrived quite late in the life of Nintendo's Game Boy yet it defied the odds and exploded in popularity. This week, we celebrate Satoshi Tajiri and the planetwide phenomenon he birthed into the world; he called it Pocket Monsters but you know it by its hip abbreviated title, Pok\u00e9mon.
The world of Pok\u00e9mon resembles that of late-20th-century Earth with one major revision: Human beings co-exist with 151 different species of wild animals collectively called Pok\u00e9mon. A vast network of social services care for, study, and train these creatures in order to benefit our mutual integration. While many Pok\u00e9mon roam free, they can also be domesticated, kept as pets, or even utilized as tools like a modern-day version of The Flintstones' animal appliances.
Starting a new game of Pok\u00e9mon means meeting Professor Oak, an elderly scientist who has devoted his life to researching these ubiquitous animals. After he explains the premise, players get to meet and name their in-game avatar, a pre-teen boy. The Professor also introduces his grandson/our rival whom we also get to name.
In Japan, these characters default to Satoshi and Shigeru, a nod to series creator Satoshi Tajiri and famed Nintendo producer Shigeru Miyamoto. Tajiri later told TIME Magazine that the protagonist is \"me when I was a kid.\" Does that mean he considers Miyamoto a rival? Far from it: In that same interview, Tajiri says \"I really look up to Miyamoto-san\u2026Since I was a teenager, playing Donkey Kong, he's always been my role model. He's a mentor for my heart.\"
After an adorable animation transforms Satoshi from a full-size manga character to a tiny sprite befitting a handheld RPG, gameplay begins. As typical for the genre, we open in our hero's bedroom at home in a small town. Mom is downstairs watching TV; she says Professor Oak wants to talk. Heading outside, we see the entirety of Pallet Town consists of just three buildings, one of which serves as Oak's laboratory.
Whether Satoshi heeds his mother's message or not, the Professor appears the moment he sets foot on the only path out of town. Oak explains that wild Pok\u00e9mon live in the tall grass\u2014exactly what Satoshi's standing in\u2014and they pose a danger to unescorted youths. For everyone's safety and to better illustrate how this game works, the Professor brings Satoshi back to the lab and offers him a Pok\u00e9mon to call his own.
Players get to pick one of three basic Pok\u00e9mon to start their journey, each embodying a different elemental type. Bulbasaur's plant-based abilities represent Earth, Charmander's heat deals Fire damage, and Squirtle attacks with Water. The game includes many more elements, all of which have their own strengths and weaknesses relative to each other. Whichever Pok\u00e9mon Satoshi chooses, Shigeru always takes one with an advantage over it, making confrontations with him a perpetual uphill challenge.
Speaking of Shigeru, he immediately urges Satoshi to face him in a battle\u2014the bread and butter of Pok\u00e9mon's gameplay. Each trainer summons a Pok\u00e9mon and takes turns commanding them to attack, use an item, or run away. In later fights players can opt to switch Pok\u00e9mon to better counter their opponents, but at this stage it's a one-on-one contest. Win or lose, Shigeru vows to \"make my Pok\u00e9mon fight to toughen it up\" and embarks on his own adventure. He'll pop up now and again during Satoshi's quest as a recurring boss battle, each time bringing stronger Pok\u00e9mon.
From this moment forward, armed with Professor Oak's gift, players depart from Pallet Town and travel the world in search of Pok\u00e9mon. Exploring tall grass triggers random battles against other Pok\u00e9mon whom you can knock out for experience points and cash. This sounds like any number of other RPGs but Pok\u00e9mon adds a twist: The only way to expand your party is to capture another creature in battle. This means fighting but not fully defeating an opponent before throwing a Pok\u00e9 Ball at them in their weakened state. If it works, you get a new travelling companion.
Pok\u00e9mon contains 151 varieties of critters but not all of them wander about in nature. Some Pok\u00e9mon evolve into new forms through combat or with special items. Other trainers will offer to trade their unique Pok\u00e9mon for one in Satoshi's collection. A few Pok\u00e9mon are so rare, the game speaks of them as mythical beings like we might describe unicorns or Bigfoot.
The most reliable method of completing your so-called Pok\u00e9dex is trading with other players in the real world using the Game Boy's Link Cable. Satoshi Tajiri told TIME Magazine that when he first saw Nintendo's handheld hardware at work, \"I thought of actual living organisms moving back and forth across the cable.\" This became a core element of Pok\u00e9mon's gameplay. \"I wanted to design a game that involved interactive communication,\" Taijiri told TIME. \"Remember, there was no Internet then. The concept of the communication cable is really Japanese: one-on-one.\"
To that end, Pok\u00e9mon debuted with not one but two slightly different cartridges, each with its own distinct lineup of monsters to encounter. Speaking to Gamasutra in 2009, original composer Junichi Masuda explained \"The basic concept of Pok\u00e9mon is trading, so how could we make the trading more attractive?\" He credits producer Shigeru Miyamoto with the idea of dividing the roster into two groups as a means to encourage players to seek out others for swapping.
At launch in Japan, the two versions were called Red and Green. An updated version, Blue, shipped at the end of 1996. When localizing Pok\u00e9mon for international markets, Nintendo used this revised edition as the base, eventually releasing Pok\u00e9mon Red and Pok\u00e9mon Blue in the United States in the fall of 1998.
In preparing Pok\u00e9mon for its tour of distant lands, Nintendo oversaw many changes to the game, including renaming a majority of the creatures to better fit local languages. Some, including series mascot Pikachu, remained the same across all borders, while others have different handles in different regions.
According to producer Tsunekazu Ishihara, Nintendo of America sought even more radical changes to Pok\u00e9mon by redesigning the monsters. In a 2000 Japanese interview with Nintendo Online Magazine, Ishihara said the U.S. branch initially pushed back on the grounds that the Pok\u00e9mon were \"too cute.\" Their proposal included a sketch of Pikachu he described as \"a tabby cat with large breasts like something from the musical Cats. It was an illustration I'd never show another person in my life.\"
By the time Pok\u00e9mon finally showed up in America, the video game arrived alongside a cross-media marketing blitz which benefitted from two years of pre-release hype. Before anyone in the U.S. knew the difference between a Voltorb and an Electrode, stories of Nintendo's newest sensation abounded on the nascent internet. Even a public-relations nightmare such as an incident where the Pok\u00e9mon anime sent Japanese kids into seizures added to the game's mystique. I remember scouring the web for a low-resolution postage-stamp-sized video of the supposedly cursed clip.
When my friends and I finally got our hands on Pok\u00e9mon Red and Blue, we were prepared to game the system by purposefully buying different versions and trading with each other as soon and as often as possible. Doing so not only accelerated the growth of our creatures\u2014Pok\u00e9mon captured by another trainer receive extra XP\u2014but helped us complete our Pok\u00e9dex faster as well.
I hadn't touched a Game Boy in years and my 1989 launch model had huge chunks of dead pixels on the screen but playing Pok\u00e9mon convinced me to upgrade to the newest model, a translucent purple Game Boy Color. It didn't matter that, as a base Game Boy cartridge, Pok\u00e9mon looked mostly the same on either device. The excitement surrounding the game motivated me to carry a Game Boy around at all times so I could play in the post office break room or anywhere else I had a few minutes to kill.
Decades later, my time with Blue remains my definitive Pok\u00e9mon experience. Nintendo offered up enhanced revisions and sequels one after another, but I had already hung up my trainer's cap. Periodically, curiosity gets the better of me and I buy Pok\u00e9mon for a new system to see if updated graphics or the promise of online trading might pique my interest but I never last more than a week or two.
One obstacle for me is the ever-increasing number of Pok\u00e9mon in the game's ecosystem. I found the \"gotta catch 'em all\" marketing hook appealing in the late 90s because it felt feasible; I may have bent a few rules but I did in fact complete my Pok\u00e9dex by registering all 151 original Pok\u00e9mon.
With 30 years of expansions, spin-offs, and updates, online databases now report over 1000 Pok\u00e9mon exist. I know that if I dive in with the latest installment it won't expect me to gather up every last one but I see that figure and my eyes glaze over. I can't keep up with Pok\u00e9mon for the same reason I don't follow college sports: There are simply too many participants to consider.
That said, I am not immune to Pok\u00e9ganda. I love looking up Pok\u00e9mon and seeing what new designs Tajiri's teams have conjured. When I visit the city of Osaka I frequently stop on the 13th floor of Daimaru where the official Nintendo and Pok\u00e9mon stores stand side-by-side\u2014the latter offering a slew of adorable souvenirs I can bring with me as gifts on trips abroad. When a new game makes the rounds on television, my daughter invariably tells me that she wants a copy of her own, at which point I remind her of the Pok\u00e9mon: Let's Go, Eevee! I bought her that she barely touched.
As I type these words a commemorative tin I got for Valentine's Day I-don't-know-how-many-years ago sits next to my PC adorned with pixel art of classic Pok\u00e9mon. The sweets inside are long gone, just like my copy of Pok\u00e9mon Blue and the hundreds of hours I spent tracking down all 151 original monsters. In a way, my fond Pok\u00e9mon memories mirror those of my outdoor adventures as a child: It was fun because of the company I kept and the promise of the unexpected. Each examination, each step into the unknown might lead to a new discovery\u2014be it a rare Tauros or a hidden Playboy magazine.
Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit has written professionally since 2009 and contributed to Retronauts since 2018. Look up feitclub on social media or visit Diamond's lofi website.
", "contentSnippet": "February 27, 1996: Red Light! Green light!\nby Diamond Feit\nPrepare yourself for a shock: I've never cared much for the outdoors. I grew up fascinated by television and the rewards it offered me in the form of cartoons and video games. I seldom played sports, I cannot swim, and my first summer camp experience at 10 years old turned me off from ever sleeping in a tent again.\nYet thinking back on those days, I certainly spent a far greater percentage of my life outside than I do now. I walked to and from school for many years, a mile each way as I recall. My friends and I often played together in our respective backyards or even in nearby vacant lots; we called one patch of undeveloped land \"the woods\" even though it barely measured a fraction of an acre.\nComparatively, I feel like my kids today out-shut-in me by far thanks to the internet. They too walk to school but they otherwise entertain themselves exclusively indoors, watching online videos or chatting with friends\u2014sometimes both at the same time. We moved here thinking they'd make the most of the nearby public park but that was before smartphones took over. I love a good swing set but that's not going to win out over anime on demand.\nI don't know whether my progeny represent the majority of kids today but I'm positive they're not all terminally online. Years of teaching in elementary schools and strolling through that aforementioned local park have shown me that certain outdoorsy traditions remain strong in our digital era. Specifically, kids love bugs and here in Japan there are plenty of distinct varieties to hunt down, capture, and store in clear plastic containers.\n30 years ago\u2014presumably when these customs had even more pull\u2014one dedicated developer transformed his own childhood hobby of insect collecting into a handheld game. His dream project arrived quite late in the life of Nintendo's Game Boy yet it defied the odds and exploded in popularity. This week, we celebrate Satoshi Tajiri and the planetwide phenomenon he birthed into the world; he called it Pocket Monsters but you know it by its hip abbreviated title, Pok\u00e9mon.\nThe world of Pok\u00e9mon resembles that of late-20th-century Earth with one major revision: Human beings co-exist with 151 different species of wild animals collectively called Pok\u00e9mon. A vast network of social services care for, study, and train these creatures in order to benefit our mutual integration. While many Pok\u00e9mon roam free, they can also be domesticated, kept as pets, or even utilized as tools like a modern-day version of The Flintstones' animal appliances.\nStarting a new game of Pok\u00e9mon means meeting Professor Oak, an elderly scientist who has devoted his life to researching these ubiquitous animals. After he explains the premise, players get to meet and name their in-game avatar, a pre-teen boy. The Professor also introduces his grandson/our rival whom we also get to name.\nIn Japan, these characters default to Satoshi and Shigeru, a nod to series creator Satoshi Tajiri and famed Nintendo producer Shigeru Miyamoto. Tajiri later told TIME Magazine that the protagonist is \"me when I was a kid.\" Does that mean he considers Miyamoto a rival? Far from it: In that same interview, Tajiri says \"I really look up to Miyamoto-san\u2026Since I was a teenager, playing Donkey Kong, he's always been my role model. He's a mentor for my heart.\"\nAfter an adorable animation transforms Satoshi from a full-size manga character to a tiny sprite befitting a handheld RPG, gameplay begins. As typical for the genre, we open in our hero's bedroom at home in a small town. Mom is downstairs watching TV; she says Professor Oak wants to talk. Heading outside, we see the entirety of Pallet Town consists of just three buildings, one of which serves as Oak's laboratory.\nWhether Satoshi heeds his mother's message or not, the Professor appears the moment he sets foot on the only path out of town. Oak explains that wild Pok\u00e9mon live in the tall grass\u2014exactly what Satoshi's standing in\u2014and they pose a danger to unescorted youths. For everyone's safety and to better illustrate how this game works, the Professor brings Satoshi back to the lab and offers him a Pok\u00e9mon to call his own.\nPlayers get to pick one of three basic Pok\u00e9mon to start their journey, each embodying a different elemental type. Bulbasaur's plant-based abilities represent Earth, Charmander's heat deals Fire damage, and Squirtle attacks with Water. The game includes many more elements, all of which have their own strengths and weaknesses relative to each other. Whichever Pok\u00e9mon Satoshi chooses, Shigeru always takes one with an advantage over it, making confrontations with him a perpetual uphill challenge.\nSpeaking of Shigeru, he immediately urges Satoshi to face him in a battle\u2014the bread and butter of Pok\u00e9mon's gameplay. Each trainer summons a Pok\u00e9mon and takes turns commanding them to attack, use an item, or run away. In later fights players can opt to switch Pok\u00e9mon to better counter their opponents, but at this stage it's a one-on-one contest. Win or lose, Shigeru vows to \"make my Pok\u00e9mon fight to toughen it up\" and embarks on his own adventure. He'll pop up now and again during Satoshi's quest as a recurring boss battle, each time bringing stronger Pok\u00e9mon.\nFrom this moment forward, armed with Professor Oak's gift, players depart from Pallet Town and travel the world in search of Pok\u00e9mon. Exploring tall grass triggers random battles against other Pok\u00e9mon whom you can knock out for experience points and cash. This sounds like any number of other RPGs but Pok\u00e9mon adds a twist: The only way to expand your party is to capture another creature in battle. This means fighting but not fully defeating an opponent before throwing a Pok\u00e9 Ball at them in their weakened state. If it works, you get a new travelling companion.\nPok\u00e9mon contains 151 varieties of critters but not all of them wander about in nature. Some Pok\u00e9mon evolve into new forms through combat or with special items. Other trainers will offer to trade their unique Pok\u00e9mon for one in Satoshi's collection. A few Pok\u00e9mon are so rare, the game speaks of them as mythical beings like we might describe unicorns or Bigfoot.\nThe most reliable method of completing your so-called Pok\u00e9dex is trading with other players in the real world using the Game Boy's Link Cable. Satoshi Tajiri told TIME Magazine that when he first saw Nintendo's handheld hardware at work, \"I thought of actual living organisms moving back and forth across the cable.\" This became a core element of Pok\u00e9mon's gameplay. \"I wanted to design a game that involved interactive communication,\" Taijiri told TIME. \"Remember, there was no Internet then. The concept of the communication cable is really Japanese: one-on-one.\"\nTo that end, Pok\u00e9mon debuted with not one but two slightly different cartridges, each with its own distinct lineup of monsters to encounter. Speaking to Gamasutra in 2009, original composer Junichi Masuda explained \"The basic concept of Pok\u00e9mon is trading, so how could we make the trading more attractive?\" He credits producer Shigeru Miyamoto with the idea of dividing the roster into two groups as a means to encourage players to seek out others for swapping.\nAt launch in Japan, the two versions were called Red and Green. An updated version, Blue, shipped at the end of 1996. When localizing Pok\u00e9mon for international markets, Nintendo used this revised edition as the base, eventually releasing Pok\u00e9mon Red and Pok\u00e9mon Blue in the United States in the fall of 1998.\nIn preparing Pok\u00e9mon for its tour of distant lands, Nintendo oversaw many changes to the game, including renaming a majority of the creatures to better fit local languages. Some, including series mascot Pikachu, remained the same across all borders, while others have different handles in different regions.\nAccording to producer Tsunekazu Ishihara, Nintendo of America sought even more radical changes to Pok\u00e9mon by redesigning the monsters. In a 2000 Japanese interview with Nintendo Online Magazine, Ishihara said the U.S. branch initially pushed back on the grounds that the Pok\u00e9mon were \"too cute.\" Their proposal included a sketch of Pikachu he described as \"a tabby cat with large breasts like something from the musical Cats. It was an illustration I'd never show another person in my life.\"\nBy the time Pok\u00e9mon finally showed up in America, the video game arrived alongside a cross-media marketing blitz which benefitted from two years of pre-release hype. Before anyone in the U.S. knew the difference between a Voltorb and an Electrode, stories of Nintendo's newest sensation abounded on the nascent internet. Even a public-relations nightmare such as an incident where the Pok\u00e9mon anime sent Japanese kids into seizures added to the game's mystique. I remember scouring the web for a low-resolution postage-stamp-sized video of the supposedly cursed clip.\nWhen my friends and I finally got our hands on Pok\u00e9mon Red and Blue, we were prepared to game the system by purposefully buying different versions and trading with each other as soon and as often as possible. Doing so not only accelerated the growth of our creatures\u2014Pok\u00e9mon captured by another trainer receive extra XP\u2014but helped us complete our Pok\u00e9dex faster as well.\nI hadn't touched a Game Boy in years and my 1989 launch model had huge chunks of dead pixels on the screen but playing Pok\u00e9mon convinced me to upgrade to the newest model, a translucent purple Game Boy Color. It didn't matter that, as a base Game Boy cartridge, Pok\u00e9mon looked mostly the same on either device. The excitement surrounding the game motivated me to carry a Game Boy around at all times so I could play in the post office break room or anywhere else I had a few minutes to kill.\nDecades later, my time with Blue remains my definitive Pok\u00e9mon experience. Nintendo offered up enhanced revisions and sequels one after another, but I had already hung up my trainer's cap. Periodically, curiosity gets the better of me and I buy Pok\u00e9mon for a new system to see if updated graphics or the promise of online trading might pique my interest but I never last more than a week or two.\nOne obstacle for me is the ever-increasing number of Pok\u00e9mon in the game's ecosystem. I found the \"gotta catch 'em all\" marketing hook appealing in the late 90s because it felt feasible; I may have bent a few rules but I did in fact complete my Pok\u00e9dex by registering all 151 original Pok\u00e9mon.\nWith 30 years of expansions, spin-offs, and updates, online databases now report over 1000 Pok\u00e9mon exist. I know that if I dive in with the latest installment it won't expect me to gather up every last one but I see that figure and my eyes glaze over. I can't keep up with Pok\u00e9mon for the same reason I don't follow college sports: There are simply too many participants to consider.\nThat said, I am not immune to Pok\u00e9ganda. I love looking up Pok\u00e9mon and seeing what new designs Tajiri's teams have conjured. When I visit the city of Osaka I frequently stop on the 13th floor of Daimaru where the official Nintendo and Pok\u00e9mon stores stand side-by-side\u2014the latter offering a slew of adorable souvenirs I can bring with me as gifts on trips abroad. When a new game makes the rounds on television, my daughter invariably tells me that she wants a copy of her own, at which point I remind her of the Pok\u00e9mon: Let's Go, Eevee! I bought her that she barely touched.\nAs I type these words a commemorative tin I got for Valentine's Day I-don't-know-how-many-years ago sits next to my PC adorned with pixel art of classic Pok\u00e9mon. The sweets inside are long gone, just like my copy of Pok\u00e9mon Blue and the hundreds of hours I spent tracking down all 151 original monsters. In a way, my fond Pok\u00e9mon memories mirror those of my outdoor adventures as a child: It was fun because of the company I kept and the promise of the unexpected. Each examination, each step into the unknown might lead to a new discovery\u2014be it a rare Tauros or a hidden Playboy magazine.\nWriter/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit has written professionally since 2009 and contributed to Retronauts since 2018. Look up feitclub on social media or visit Diamond's lofi website.", "guid": "151846101", "isoDate": "2026-03-01T12:00:14.000Z", "itunes": { "duration": "1051", "image": "https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/151846101/470920db0f8f406da2e3e3a7f470405a/eyJkIjo3MiwiaCI6MzAwMCwic3RyaXBfYWxwaGEiOjEsInciOjMwMDAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-hash=ybatrgQAbUfXNtUW_JsZdXuz-sWdDOPn-ddWQo9M1bs%3D" }, "itunes_duration": "0:17:30" }