The History of the Makers of Pokémon

How do you follow up the biggest video game franchise on the planet? For thirty years, the creators of Pokémon have been trying to solve that riddle. This summer, they just might do it.

Even if you’ve never heard of Game Freak, you know the general outline of its story. In the mid-1990s, the Japanese game studio published a long, troubled Game Boy game called Pocket Monsters. A year later, the series arrived in the US as Pokémon. And from then until now, Game Freak has spent the majority of its money, time, and talent on growing the series into an intellectual property that lives in the rarefied air alongside Mickey Mouse and Hello Kitty.

But few game designers say “I want to be an IP maintainer when I grow up.”

Early in Pokémon’s success, some members of Game Freak began to feel constrained by their own success. The studio, which began life as a video game zine run by picky arcade gamers, had fostered a culture of innovation and risk-taking – something that protecting Pikachu and pals at best discourages, and at worst, prohibits.

Nonetheless, every few years, a passion project would gain traction amongst the team, like Drill Dozer in 2005 and HarmoKnight in 2012. By 2019, over twenty years into Pokémon, Game Freak leadership shifted these passion projects into genuine priorities, empowering a non-Pokémon team dubbed Gear Project to create new series.

In an interview with VGC in 2019, Game Freak programmer and director Masayuki Onoue explained: “There are two different production teams here, simply named Production Team 1 and Production Team 2. “Team 1 is fully dedicated to Gear Project, while Team 2 is for the Pokémon operation. [...] What that means is that Game Freak as a company is prioritising Gear Project, which is production team number one, more than Pokémon in general. We are always trying to create something that is equally exciting, or more exciting than Pokémon.”

Even with Gear Project as the priority, seven years have passed since the studio published a non-Pokémon game, the poorly received and largely forgotten Little Town Hero from 2019.

This summer, Game Freak hopes to at last prove that it can, as Onoue said, create something that is “equally exciting, or more exciting than Pokémon.” Beast of Reincarnation is a 3D-action RPG set in a distant post-apocalyptic Japan. And early impressions are glowing.

Ahead of the game’s release, I wanted to learn about Game Freak’s thirty-year journey to follow-up Pokemon. Naturally, I contacted game designer and historian Robert Sephazon, who's known in the games community as the person with an encyclopedic knowledge of Game Freak’s history, from Pulseman to Tembo the Badass Elephant and beyond.

This is a story of the many beloved, but ultimately overlooked attempts to create a worthy successor to Pokémon. It’s a story of the makers of Pikachu struggling to make lightning strike twice. It’s a story of always wanting more.

• Act 1: Game Freak’s Thirty Years of Brilliant False Starts

• Act 2: Beast of Reincarnation Won’t Be Ignored

• Patreon Bonus: Game Freak’s Top 5 Games (That Aren’t Pokémon)

• Act 3: A New Game Magazine? In This Economy?!

• Robert Sephazon: Game designer, producer, historian, and curator

• Ryan Rigney: Editor-in-chief, Chisel

Early access to ad-free episodes, weekly bonus segments, and monthly bonus episodes, including monthly episodes of Past Games, where experts share the histories of beloved games. You might enjoy this episode on the history of The Legend of Zelda with Max Nichols, game designer, educator, and operator of Hyrule Interviews!

• The Pokémon origin story (Post Games)

• Fans treat Nintendo differently (Post Games)

• Pokémon Red And Blue: The Kotaku Retro Review (Kotaku)

• Pocket Card Jockey (Wiki)

• HarmoKnight (Wiki)

• The Ultimate Game Freak (Time)

• Beast of Reincarnation (Steam)

• Game Freak ‘prioritising’ original game projects (VGC)

• Drill Dozer – 2005 Developer Interview (shmuplations)

• The Plucky Squire (Steam)

• James Turner (Bulbapedia)

• Beast of Reincarnation Game Director Answers All Our Burning Questions About the Pokemon Developer’s Upcoming Action Game (IGN)

• Beast of Reincarnation: Parrying Helps Your Dog (Game Informer)

• 5. Pocket Card Jockey (Wiki)

• Umamusume: Pretty Derby (Wiki)

• Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! review – saddle up for eccentricity (The Guardian)

• 4. HarmoKnight (Wiki)

• HarmoKnight Review - BNGR! (Balrog/YouTube)

• 3. Mario & Wario (Wiki)

• Mario & Wario (SNES) Playthrough (NintendoComplete/YouTube)

• 2. Pulseman (Wiki)

• Pulseman playthrough Longplay (FCPlaythroughs/YouTube)

• 1. Drill Dozer (Wiki)

• Drill Dozer Review (IGN)

• Chisel (ChiselMag.com)

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• Game File (gamefile.news)

• Mothership (Mothership.blog)

• Push to Talk (pushtotalk.gg)

• The best games of 2026 so far, picked by NPR’s staff (NPR)

• Revisit E3 Like You’ve Never Seen it Before (The Video Game History Foundation/YouTube)

• In An Era Of AI Slop, Meccha Chameleon Embraces Human-Crafted Chaos (GameSpot)

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• The Women Who Kill Are the Ones That Saved Me (Stop Caring)

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• Best Of Both Worlds: Capcom is in the midst of a Golden Age, and we spoke with producer Masachika Kawata about how the publisher / developer has managed this during an era of extreme industry volatility (Game Informer)

• The Addams Family pinball: An oral history (Design Room)

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