Gail Tilden, former Nintendo of America’s marketing boss, recently spoke to The Video Game History Foundation’s Frank Cifaldi at the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo, and one of the topics she touched upon was the small matter of launching Pokémon in the West.
As you’ll probably be aware, Pokémon—or Pocket Monsters, as it’s known in Japan—was already something of a phenomenon in its homeland before it reached North America and Europe, and it was Tilden’s job to repackage it for Western tastes.
Speaking to Cifaldi, she reveals that before she came on board the project, there were some unusual ideas about how to market the series outside of Japan:
So, in January of 1998, I was asked if I would lead the team to bring Pokémon out of Japan to the rest of the world, other than China and Korea. Prior to me getting involved that directly as team lead, we had all seen the game, a black and white RPG on Game Boy with very Japanese characters, and then our ad agency said, could we just change the art and it’ll be like, gritty, and we’ll make like, you know, graffiti on the walls and stuff like that.
This practice of ‘toughening up’ Japanese games for Western kids wasn’t anything new, but Tilden’s next revelation is quite interesting:
There was also a thought like… is the way that the game is formatted, could we make it that they’re all baseball players in a baseball league, but not like a Pokémon league?
Thankfully, as Tilden explains, Pokémon was becoming such a multimedia success in Japan that it became clear that any attempt to tinker with the formula would comprise localisation efforts:
As all this discussion and meetings were going on for a few months, Pokémon was heating up and heating up. Now there’s TV shows. Now there’s comic books. Now they get, you know, movies and more games and toys.
And so finally, Mr. Arakawa said, Forget it. We’re just doing it. We’re doing it. And not only we’re doing it, we’re going to do it all. We’re doing the whole thing. We want control of the whole thing.
And so we need all the rights gathered up in Japan, and we want all the rights given to Nintendo of America. And we had a licensing agency we worked with, which was 4kids, and so we’re going to work with them, and we’re going to make sure that it’s done the way it was in Japan, and we’re going to make sure we can control everything.
The rest, as they say, is history—but it’s amazing to consider just how close we were to getting Pokémon under the guise of a baseball RPG.
