Game Freak with Mario on the Side

Behind the success that is Pokémon, there are the brilliant minds of those at Game Freak, the company that conceived the main series games. Ever since Pokémon became popular, they have primarily dealt with the franchise and its games, becoming a second-party developer to Nintendo. Before and after Pokémon was formally conceived, however, Game Freak did deal with the development of other games within the 1990s, a few of them being from the Mario franchise as something I also appreciate. They are fascinating in their own right, even in consideration of Pokémon and the ways they are connected.

One of those games is called Yoshi (the U.S. name, other regions are slightly different), which in addition to Mario also stars the dinosaur that sometimes accompanies him. The game, which was released for the NES and Game Boy, is an "action puzzle" game involving matching Mario enemies and hatching eggs that contain the dinosaur. There is an apparent Pokémon connection in that the Pokémon Center music partly resembles the Star theme in this game, and that the game's premise resembles some Pokémon concepts; in any case, the meager success from the game also supported Game Freak and enabled the creation of Pokémon, which is quite fascinating indeed.

The other game is a little-known game for the Super NES called Mario & Wario, featuring the latter in an antagonistic role. The reason it is little-known is because the game is (or remained) Japan-only, despite a Western release having been indicated afterwards and the game itself not being in Japanese. The game is a puzzle platform game involving guiding characters that can't see their way due to objects on their heads. Satoshi Tajiri also worked on the design of this game, as with the previous game above. The memory of this game survives in a reference on the Super NES of the Copycat in Saffron City in the first generation games, described as a "game with Mario wearing a bucket". Though little-known, this remains significant.

Meanwhile, later on in the 1990s, Nintendo released a peripheral called the Game Boy Camera. Game Freak actually handled the (game) software aspect of this peripheral, a fact that many might not be aware of. While quite a bit of the software has linkages to Mario, there are also little bits that deal with Pokémon. Several Pokémon sprites were present prior to the U.S. release of the first generation games, and some Pokémon stickers can be printed with the aid of the Game Boy Printer. Still, on the whole, the software is highly linked to Mario rather than Pokémon, with many images referencing the former. Yet it's only natural for the developers to start to include what would become their bestsellers.

The brilliance of Game Freak seems to be rather apparent outside of Pokémon and in particular in relation to Mario with the games they developed. In a way, through only the mild success of Yoshi and the limited release of Mario & Wario, they developed themselves so that they can develop other things, notably Pokémon as their incredible success of today, whilst they learned a side way of working with that success with the Game Boy Camera. Beyond that, they are poised to take in all the development successes of Pokémon and conceive more brilliant successes along the way.

One year ago: Pokémon Go Community Day, 6/8/2019

Two years ago: Pokémon Go Event Rollup, 6/8/2018

Three years ago: Poor Zygarde