There are many gaming franchises in the world that you can easily say have a major impact on the industry. One such franchise is Pokemon. For ever since the original titles, the world has been in love with the games, which has led to animes, mangas, loads of toys, and much more. It also goes to reason though that if the games weren’t around, none of these would exist in the context they are now. Why do I bring this up? Because a member of Game Freak has revealed that the company almost lost all the game data during production of the original titles.
This comes from Junichi Masuda, who has been at Game Freak for a very long time, including work on Pokemon Red, Blue, and Green, he revealed that a computer crash almost took everything away.
Somewhere midway through the development, maybe in the fourth year or so, we had a really bad crash that we couldn’t, we didn’t know how to recover the computer from. That had all of the data for the game, all of the Pokémon, the main character and everything. It really felt like, “Oh my God, if we can’t recover this data, we’re finished here.” I just remember doing a lot of different research. I called the company that I used to work for, seeing if they had any advice to recover the data.
The panic was very real, and Masuda did everything he could to get the data back:
I would go on this internet service provider back then called Nifty Serve. It’s like a Japanese version of CompuServe. I’d go on and ask people that I never talked to for advice on how to recover the data. I would look at these English books about the machine itself, because there wasn’t a lot of information in Japanese, just to figure it out. We eventually figured out how to recover it, but that was like the most nerve-racking moment, I think, in development.
Nerve-racking indeed, and it goes without saying that if the original Pokemon games hadn’t come out, the world would be much different.
