It’s the thirty-year anniversary of the very first Pokémon games which were released back in 1996. Nintendo is pulling out all the stops reminding us. But unofficial historians are getting in on the act too, with The History of the Pokémon Games by James Batchelor coming out on March 30th courtesy of Pen & Sword Books. The title’s a bit of an odd choice for an imprint best known for military history, although really, when you think about it, Pokémon is a war of its own.
Whether this unofficial volume qualifies as a true history will likely depend on how nitpicky you want to get in regard to the exact details. There are several factual errors in here, but all of them are roughly on the lines of statements like saying shiny Pokémon were only aesthetically different from their counterparts, with no stat differences. This wasn’t actually true, for the second generation in which they first appeared anyway, although there are very few contexts where the technical difference is all that important.
Batchelor’s history in broad strokes is accurate, although the detail goes down as the book goes on. Part of this is just because the development of Pokémon has grown so complicated over the years that by the time we hit the sixth generation, there’s really no longer any pretense of this being any kind of underdog operation. That doesn’t make the details of the first generation any less fun, mind you. The origins of Gamefreak as a literal game zine (which you can read online if you like although obviously it’s all in Japanese) never stop being fun.
Although the lack of a Gunpei Yokoi acknowledgment irritated me. We all know Shigeru Miyamato was involved, but Gunpei Yokoi is an unsung hero of Pokémon for helping Gamefreak afloat by interceding to give them the right to use Nintendo licensed characters for their puzzle games, which Batchelor incorrectly implies were premised as having Nintendo character licenses from the outset. Again, this omission doesn’t doom the book’s overall scholarship, but it does beg the question of why we need an unofficial compendium of the Pokémon games if Batchelor is just going to use the usual Nintendo story that tends to obfuscate Yokoi’s existence.
The answer? Batchelor includes, at the end of each chapter of the mainline games, an extended compendium of every licensed Pokémon game that was released during this time period. While the individual entries in this compendium are much shorter than the chapters, they’re an incredibly useful reference for anyone trying to keep track of all these games. And there’s probably no better resource than this book for keeping all these games straight, as these titles range from sleeper classics to forgotten abandonware to games Nintendo quite literally tried to destroy. Apparently, Nintendo was furious when Warner Brothers overstepped their contract and hired Cyberworld International Corporation to make a browser game based on the Pokémon 2000 movie, and the game was thought lost until 2023 when DidYouKnowGaming was able to find a copy.
The compendium tells a sort of story in itself of just how much game development has changed over the last thirty years. The crude edutainment titles of the nineties and the aughts give way to the gacha games of the teens, a trend that feels more than a little ominous when put together in a timeline like that. Only a true expert on Pokémon is likely to be familiar with even half the games that Batchelor discusses here. Sure, I might know about EV functionality and Gunpei Yokoi but I still learned a lot about spin-offs and apps from this book I doubt I ever would have found out about otherwise.
This, coupled with high quality photos, nice glossy pages, and reasonably large type make The History of the Pokémon Games a very good coffee table book. The presentation allows for much of the trivia to exceed the sum of its parts, making for a remarkably coherent narrative that reads more like a corporate history intended for internal use than marketing copy intended to sell us on more Pokémon merch. This is an easy book to recommend for any fan of the series, and even those who are just a little curious what Pokémon is even all about.
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