Current Events > Do you ever wonder why Pokemon came out on handhelds instead of the SNES

(+) Yeah! (+)

I've always kind of wondered about that. They would have had so much more room for graphics, environments, maybe even programming that wasn't held together by duct tape and wishes if they had opted to use the SNES instead of the Gameboy. If there's any kind of source, article, interview etc out there explaining their reasoning, I've never found it.

What if we live in the one branch of the multiverse that had handheld only main series pokemon games for 30 years?

Never should have come here.

For trading and battling

IIRC GameFreak wanted to make a game that used the Gameboy link cable.

Source:https://lavacutcontent.com/satosh i-tajiri-new-game-design/

Trading. They likened it to bug collecting and with the GB you could trade the "bugs" around, while with a console that was pretty obviously not a thing. Battling also came in as a major reason, something that was also popular with bug collectors, and that was the second thing thing they came up with that cemented it on the handheld.

It wouldn't be as popular considering that there are 100 million Gameboys compared to 50 million SNES

because they copied this model ..

In 1996, Bandai rocked the toy world with the introduction of the Tamagotchi virtual pet, a pocket-sized electronic keychain toy that required constant care and attention from its owner. - the Internet

1)To encourage trading and battling.

2) Because the SNES didn't come with the technology that you could hook up to another system in order to do so.

ellis123 posted...

Battling also came in as a major reason, something that was also popular with bug collectors

I'm sorry is that true are people really out there collecting bugs and making them fight each other as a hobby o.o

Imagine a Snes cartridge with a port for the GameBoy cable.
...or they could have used the port below the console...
To trade, you would need two Snes consoles close to each others, and two TVs next to each others.
...well, you could hook up both to one TV and switch channel, but how fun would that be?
And it wouldnt be named Pokemon, because you wont have monsters in your pocket.

...thinking about it, they could make it work on one Snes if they used a lockon thing, like Sonic 3 & Knuckles, using the first cartridge as master, accessing the savefile from the second cartridge...

As others said, it was so players could trade and battle with each other. The SNES had no way of linking two systems together in the same way the Game Boy did.

ellis123 posted...

Trading. They likened it to bug collecting and with the GB you could trade the "bugs" around, while with a console that was pretty obviously not a thing. Battling also came in as a major reason, something that was also popular with bug collectors, and that was the second thing thing they came up with that cemented it on the handheld.

No. Bug fighting may have been popular but Tajiri in interviews has stated that he was aware of it but never participated in it. Capsule Monsters already had fighting as part of the concept and originally Pokmon was more like a traditional RPG.

It wasn't until further in development that Pokmon started to be shaped up by Tajiri childhood of exploring nature and catching animals in which the concept of Pokmon as we know it today emerged from. But bug fighting was never part of that inspiration, when we turn to Tajiri's biography he started viewing Pokmon as these friendly creatures that are more like cats and dogs. Indeed in his biography he pretty much admits that he started to conceptualize Pokmon battles as two pet owners allowing their pets, in this case two dogs, to duke it out, not two bugs fighting one another.

https://imgur.com/a/CMLcE6m

It's about the most obvious reason in the world.

Take your gameboy, and walk outside. Does it still work? Great!

Now take your Super Nintendo outside. Feel that? That's your spine shattering from the CRT you're carrying.

Jerry_Hellyeah posted...

It's about the most obvious reason in the world.

Take your gameboy, and walk outside. Does it still work? Great!

Now take your Super Nintendo outside. Feel that? That's your spine shattering from the CRT you're carrying.

Or connect the Super Nintendo to a Game Gear with the TV tuner cartridge.

CaptainStrong posted...

Or connect the Super Nintendo to a Game Gear with the TV tuner cartridge.

Confessing to owning a Nintendo AND a Sega console in the 90s at the same time? That's a felony, dude.

KTG2 posted...

I'm sorry is that true are people really out there collecting bugs and making them fight each other as a hobby o.o

It was a thing in Japan a long time ago, yeah. No clue if it's a real thing nowadays.

Piplup_Sniper posted...

No. Bug fighting may have been popular but Tajiri in interviews has stated that he was aware of it but never participated in it. Capsule Monsters already had fighting as part of the concept and originally Pokmon was more like a traditional RPG.

It wasn't until further in development that Pokmon started to be shaped up by Tajiri childhood of exploring nature and catching animals in which the concept of Pokmon as we know it today emerged from. But bug fighting was never part of that inspiration, when we turn to Tajiri's biography he started viewing Pokmon as these friendly creatures that are more like cats and dogs. Indeed in his biography he pretty much admits that he started to conceptualize Pokmon battles as two pet owners allowing their pets, in this case two dogs, to duke it out, not two bugs fighting one another.

I know. I'm saying that trading was *the* reason that they did GB, and that battling became a secondary aspect as to why they really pushed the connection.