New Pokemon Snap was a title that many people were waiting on in 2021 (which we can now say was last year, happy 2022!), and part of the reason for that was because of how much fun the original title was on the N64. And that led to a lot of people wondering why it took so long for the sequel to be made. The answer was that apparently they didn’t think they could make a game around the concept of taking photos of Pokemon anymore.
This came in a revealing interview in Famitsu that featured Pokemon president Tsunekazu Ishihara and director Haruki Suzaki. The former of whom noted the difficulties they had to start:
“With the release of every new generation of consoles, be it the GameCube or Wii, we discussed making a sequel. Taking photos has become something we do every day and its novelty isn’t what it once was, so it was a difficult concept to design an game around. There was a lot of debate about how the gimmick would work, which made it difficult to start development.
They noted that working with Bandai Namco on the title was the right decision as they were blown away by the detail put into the game in terms of both the Pokemon and the backgrounds. But it all came back to the core concept of taking Pokemon photos, and Suzaki had a lot to say on that:
“It’s been more than 20 years since the Nintendo 64 release of Pokemon Snap and the problem we faced was whether or not we should change the game’s core concept. It was a great opportunity for us; reflecting on the game proved to have a big influence on development. The more I heard about what happened during development of the last game, the more it reaffirmed our decision to stick with the original game’s concept. From there, it was finding things within the core concept we could expand on to better suit today’s market.”
You can check out our review of New Pokemon Snap here.
