Where It All Began
Pokémon Day is celebrated every year on February 27th — a celebration of Pokémon, its history, and its future. I thought I’d take today to explore the very first Pokémon products ever released: ポケットモンスター 赤 and ポケットモンスター 緑 — Pocket Monsters: Red and Pocket Monsters: Green.
Released on February 27, 1996 in Japan for the Game Boy, these two games were the first ever commercial Pokémon products. Published by Nintendo and developed by Game Freak, they launched at ¥3,900 each — roughly £20 at the time. Nobody could have predicted what would follow.
Thirty years later, Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise in history. It all started with two Game Boy cartridges and 151 monsters.
The Games
Pocket Monsters Red and Green were role-playing games that dropped you into the Kanto region as a young trainer tasked with catching, battling, and cataloguing 151 Pokémon. The core loop — explore, catch, train, battle — was deceptively simple but endlessly compelling.
What made them special was the connectivity. Game Freak founder Satoshi Tajiri designed the games around the idea of meaningful social interaction. Each version had exclusive Pokémon that could only be obtained by trading with someone who owned the other version, using the Game Boy’s Link Cable. You physically needed another person. In an era before online play, this was revolutionary — it turned a single-player RPG into a social experience.
Combined, Red and Green sold 8.22 million copies in Japan alone. That figure has only ever been surpassed domestically by Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. For a Game Boy title released with virtually no marketing budget and developed by a small studio that had nearly gone bankrupt during production, those numbers are staggering.
Tajiri’s vision was simple: recreate the experience of collecting insects as a child — but through a Game Boy screen, with a friend at the other end of a cable.
Before the Games: New Game Design
The first published work to ever mention Pokémon wasn’t a game at all. It was a book.
In December 1995 — two months before Red and Green launched — Satoshi Tajiri published New Game Design through Enix. On pages 156–159, Tajiri discussed the game he’d been developing for six years. The book contained early sprites, concept art, and game design philosophy for what would become Pocket Monsters.
Among the inspirations Tajiri cited were Dragon Quest, the Kamen Rider trading card album, traditional Menko cards, and Robocon cards. The DNA of Pokémon — collecting, battling, trading — was there from the very beginning, drawn from the physical card games and insect collecting of Tajiri’s childhood.
New Game Design is the earliest public record of Pokémon. The sprites and data it contains predate the games themselves.
Design Inspirations
| Inspiration | Influence on Pokémon |
|---|---|
| Dragon Quest | RPG structure and monster encounters |
| Kamen Rider Album | Trading card collection mechanics |
| Menko Cards | Traditional Japanese card battling |
| Robocon Cards | Character collecting and trading |
Timeline: The First Pokémon Products
It’s easy to think of Pokémon as something that exploded overnight, but the franchise grew product by product across 1995 and 1996. Here’s every “first” in order.
The Legacy
What started with two Game Boy games in 1996 became the highest-grossing media franchise in history. The anime, the trading card game, the merchandise empire, the mobile games, the movies — all of it traces back to a developer who nearly went bankrupt making a game about catching bugs.
Today, thirty years later, we celebrate Pokémon Day. And it all started here.
Happy Pokémon Day. Here’s to the next thirty years.