Game Freak nearly lost Pokemon Red and Green

Major technical difficulties

This month is Pokémon‘s 20th anniversary, which seems like as good an opportunity as any for the development team to share some memories of their time working on the series over the years.

Game Freak’s Junichi Masuda has done just that, recalling his time working as a programmer, composer, and sound designer on Pokémon Red and Green. Masuda says during that time his computers were always overheating and breaking down, and while he worked hard to fix them, he still wound up going through three or four machines in his six years developing the original games.

“I sure am glad I fixed those computers back then,” Masuda mentioned, adding “If I hadn’t, the original Red and Green games might never have come out! That’s a scary thought!”