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Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario and Zelda, learned essential elements of good video games when he made his first one under Yokoi's supervision. Since then, he has never lost his respect for the senior creator - even after he himself became the most respected game designer on earth. I'll tell you the story in a future article.
Shigeru Miyamoto (2000 @ Nintendo) :
He would play my games under development for hours without a break and make pointed remarks about what aspects need to be improved, in very short sentences.
Although it was tough to admit my lack of deep thought, I was impressed by his professional behavior and promised myself one day I will become a skilled game developer like him.
- Game Taikoku Nippon (ISBN:4413032063, p.106) Seishun Publishing in Japanese
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Satoshi Tajiri, the father of Pokemon, was in a desperate situation when he met Yokoi for the first time. Before then he was, as the name of his company indicates, a "Game Freak" who pursue his own interests.
It was not a wrong approach considering the fact he started his career as an indie game developer. He made his first game "Mendel Palace" with passion and love for video games.
Youtube: Quinty (Japanese version of Mendel Palace)
When it was released by Namco, he earned about half a million dollars and launched his own company. Although he was not so much interested in running a business, he thought it was a necessary step for him and his team to become professional game developers. But it later caused him growing pains.
After he became the president of Game Freak in 1989, he had been thinking for months about what kinds of games he should make. At that time, he had a notion that the industry lacked innovative products which provide entirely new experiences. After some research, he found a potential key to success inside Nintendo's newly released device : GameBoy.
Although the handheld game machine, which was developed by Yokoi, had a serial port for data exchange, there was no game which brought out the best of it. Certainly, many games supported the feature to implement multiplayer battles; the extraordinary success of Tetris would never have happened without it. But they were far from the innovative game experiences Tajiri was searching for.
One day, the basic idea of Pokemon, which was originally called "Capsule Monsters", suddenly occurred to him. He thought that if players could trade some valuable virtual items in the game, they would enjoy new social experiences no other game had ever provided. So, he wrote a proposal based on the idea and submitted it to Nintendo.
Youtube: Pokemon Beta | Capsule Monsters (a collection of original documents of Pokemon)
When the development process was to begin in 1990, he estimated it would not take more than a year to finish - which later proved to be a huge mistake - so, he signed a small contract with the publisher and received a moderate amount of money as the cost for development. But the actual development process was anything but smooth. About a year later, he found that he still had an enormous amount of work to do while his company was running out of money.
Actually, they had been developing three games in parallel to diversify the risk of failure, but unfortunately all of those projects were behind schedule. Facing a live-or-die situation for the company, he had been struggling to find a way to save it.
(continue to part 2)