Mad about Science: Pokémon

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

“This is it. This is the idea I’ve been waiting for.” 

— Hiroshi Yamauchi, former Nintendo president.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret.

I was a Pokémon kid. Shocking, right? The guy who paints toy dragons as an adult was into digitized monsters as a child.

Before you roll your eyes and turn the page, there will be some interesting science facts tucked away in the paragraphs of this article — things unrelated to difficult-to-pronounce names or weird geometric shapes intended to vaguely resemble an organic creature. If you’ve ever been curious about how a multi-billion-dollar gaming franchise gets developed, this is the article for you.

Also, it’s for Pokémon kids.

Pokémon is a lot of things; for the sake of brevity, we’ll be exclusively talking about the original roleplaying game for the Nintendo Game Boy. Development began in 1990, but the game was not released to the public until 1996. This kind of timeline is considered brisk by modern AAA game industry standards, as we’ve waited nearly 13 years and counting for a sequel to Skyrim; but, in the 1990s, a six-year development period was development hell — a term gamers have used for doomed products.

Technology was rapidly advancing throughout the ’90s, making the eventual 1996 release of Pocket Monsters Red and Pocket Monsters Green in Japan a miracle. At the time of the game’s release, the Game Boy was nearing the end of its life cycle and the Nintendo 64 and Game Boy Color were about to sweep the world. Worse yet, after six years in development, the Pocket Monsters games received a cold reception and faced dissolution into obscurity — that is, until Mew was showcased in the monthly manga magazine, CoroCoro Comic.

Pokémania hit in full force.

To fully appreciate just how insane and impossible that stroke of luck was, we need to look into how the game was developed, and why Mew was important.

The Game Boy seems like an archaic tool to us now — something ancient farmers may have used to dig in their fields or read signs of the star, and not just in Harvest Moon. It was essentially half a computer, equipped with a display screen, a CPU and controller inputs. On its own it was a brick tied to a pack of batteries. Game cartridges were the other half of the equation — limited packaged digital storage units that often had a small battery and some form of memory, called read-only memory (or ROM). 

Some game cartridges used static random access memory (SRAM), which is similar to the RAM you have in your computer now. This allowed the program to “remember” your progress, which was important in a 20-hour campaign you wanted to set down in order to sleep or eat. If the battery in the cartridge died, so did your save file.

Today, all of the components required to run a game are built into the console.

Another stark difference in how the original Pocket Monsters games were designed in relation to current titles is the coding. Most games out today are written in high-level programming languages, often C#. The Pocket Monsters games were written in Z80 Assembly, a low-level programming language that interacted directly with the hardware of the device. This was imperative when a cartridge had 32 kilobytes of ROM. Every piece of code mattered — if developers ran out of space, there was no recourse.

That being said, ’90s Pokémon kids are still haunted by a name whispered around campfires in fear of conjuring the great evil that would devour your save.

Missingno.

Missingno is an abbreviation of “missing number.” Each Pokémon species was assigned a hexadecimal value between 0 and 255. This value was called by the computer when certain parameters were met to initiate combat. If you were walking through grass in a certain area, it would pull certain values based on where you were, the letters in your name and other factors. This ensured things remained thematic, so that you’d encounter specific creatures in specific areas reliably. Missingno exists 39 times in this data; and, when encountered under a certain set of conditions, can completely trash your game.

It’s been discovered that most of the Missingno appearances were creatures the developers had started to create but abandoned partway through the process. These creatures were later added to Pokémon Silver and Pokémon Gold with new names and appearances. Eight-year-old Brenden can finally rest — it was just rushed programming!

So how does this fit into Mew?

When the game reached a stage the developers deemed “complete enough,” they removed the debugging tools. One of the creators went rogue at this point by programming a new monster into the newfound 300 bytes of free space.This creature was Mew. Mew was unobtainable unless you managed to glitch the game in a very specific way.

As we learned earlier, the game almost flopped until CoroCoro Comic covered Mew. This led to an explosion of people in Japan buying up every copy they could to try and capture the elusive pocket monster. This led to the developers coming up with an idea to host a contest in which players would write in, and they would select a handful of winners that would send their cartridge and have Mew unlocked personally by the creators. They received more than 78,000 submissions and replicated the process in the U.S. a year later, while Pokémania was sweeping the globe and a young Brenden was mischievously torching his Game Boy by exploiting the Old Man glitch in pursuit of Missingno.

Whoops.

Stay curious, 7B.