The following excerpts come from a new Game Informer feature about Pokémon developer Game Freak:
Game Freak began as a magazine in Japan, or as Pokémon producer and composer and Game Freak co-founder Junichi Masuda refers to it, a mini comic. Satoshi Tajiri, who is credited as Pokémon’s creator, would visit arcades, talk to their owners and get tips for the games that would be included in the magazine, but making video games was always its goal. As a small group of video game fans, they didn’t think they could make an arcade game, but with the release of the Famicom (the Nintendo Entertainment System in America) Game Freak thought it might finally be able to make something.
“When we first decided we wanted to make a game for the Famicom, that’s when we started development on Quinty [Mendel Palace in America], and we were really true indies at the time,” Masuda says, “We were just friends doing a hobby as we built this game.” Quinty is a puzzle game where the player flips tiles on a grid in order to avoid or dispose of enemies on a mission to save their girlfriend. The game was published by Namco in Japan. “When we first started making the game we didn’t really have any official development equipment, so we just sort of had to hack the NES and figure out how it worked so we could develop on it ourselves without the official sort of development tools,” Masuda says. To read the rest of this feature, click here.
Source: Game Informer
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