As a lifelong Pokemon fan (been with the franchise since Gen 1!), I’ve always felt a kind of “compulsion” to not only get every new main entry, and some of the spinoffs, but for each Poke-generation, get both versions so I can have “two different journeys” and see what pocket monsters are available in both versions. However, have you wondered why that happened at all? As in, why did they always make two copies for the main titles instead of just one, like every other gaming IP out there? The answer, apparently, has something to do…with Mario.
This comes from Shigeru Miyamoto himself, who, as noted by Nintendo Everything, revealed a story about the original games, Red & Green, and how their director noted that to beat the Mario franchise, you had to sell two games of Mario’s one:
“A long time ago, before creating the first Pokémon software, Tajiri, the director of Pokémon, joked with me that ‘if you want to surpass Nintendo’s Mario, you’ll have to sell two copies of the software to each customer.’ That was one of the reasons Pokemon Red and Green were created. I believe that it is precisely because there are people like this who are determined to ‘surpass them somehow’ that new things are born.”
That’s definitely one way to go about it! And nine generations, and a near infinite amount of spinoffs, in, it’s clearly working! The franchise sold over 100 million software units on the OG Switch alone, and its new entry, Legends Z-A, which just got a new trailer for its DLC, is already over 6 million units sold across both Switch systems.
This just goes to show that you never know what’ll work until you try it.
Source: Nintendo Everything
