Today we're gonna focus on some new
translations, overlooked details, and some newly discovered info about Gen 2's
final build. Originally, Pokemon Gold & Silver were very different games that essentially
followed the vision of Satoshi Tajiri, the series creator and director of Gen 1.
To understand how drastic the change was, here’s an excerpt from a Japanese magazine we had
translated where programmer Tetsuya Watanabe says: "That version's a completely different game
from what made it to store shelves. Everything got remade after that... The first world map was
very grand in scale and based on the entirety of Japan. However, this meant we couldn’t spare much
cartridge space for each individual town, nor put much distance between them, so it all felt much
more compact than the Kanto games." Development was a bit of a struggle, and things weren’t
going too well -- Game Freak also felt tremendous pressure to up their game after Gen 1 unexpectedly
became the best-selling games of all time. They didn't wanna disappoint their millions
and millions of fans. So Tajiri stepped aside, and let Junichi Masuda take his place and recreate
Gold & Silver according to his own vision. The original Tajiri build of Gold & Silver's best
known for appearing in the leaked Space World 1997 demos. It had a unique Johtodex that ended up
getting almost entirely scrapped, and all of Japan squeezed inside. In another Japanese magazine,
Masuda explains his complete transformation of Gen 2, saying: "I took over direction of Gold &
Silver from Tajiri, then went to Kyoto to create my vision for the Johto region... I remember
staying at a hotel, visiting temples to gather information, then going back to the hotel and
calling everyone, and we'd work out what to put on the map. For example, when I went to the Pagoda at
Toji Temple (the East temple), I heard that a long time ago there used to be a West temple as well.
I thought ‘ah, I want to use that,’ so I added the Burned Tower. Once I got back home to Tokyo,
I had a good idea of what Johto would look like." In the Tajiri version, places had
names like Mt Fuji, Silent Hill, and Old City. Some were probably placeholders,
but regardless -- in Masuda's version, they went back to naming places after colors, like
what they did in Gen 1. Goldenrod, Ecruteak City, and Mahogany Town, for example. In one of these
magazines, they say they intentionally chose unusual and old-fashioned words for colors, so
when fans got older, eventually they'd come across those colors as adults and think, "huh, that's
the name of that Pokemon town." Like Cianwood City -- most kids don't know cyan's basically
sky blue. Interestingly though, the colors that represent towns aren't the same between
Japanese and English. For example, in Japan, Cianwood City's called Tanba City -- which is
more of an ocean green, which makes more sense for a seaside city. Azalea Town's Japanese name is
Hiwada Town, a dark brown color -- which unlike in English, matches the town's roofs. New Bark Town's
called Wakaba Town, which is light green -- again, the same color as the roofs. And even y'all adults
probably still don't know what Ecruteak City is... ecru's a light brown, but in Japan it's Enju City,
which is actually red As for Johto itself -- we actually need to clear up some misinformation.
In 64Dream magazine, the interviewer asks what Johto means, and Masuda says: "Jo can mean
castle. So it's like 'the capital of castles.'" You may've read on places like Bulbapedia that
Johto means "castle palace" or "lattice-shaped palace." It ain't Bulbapedia's fault though --
that info originally comes from the official English translation of Junichi Masuda's blog.
Masuda had Hiro Nakamura translate it for an English audience -- Hiro's the guy who came
up with most early Pokemon's English names. I'm sure he's a great translator, but he really
didn't put much effort into Masuda's blog -- which is apparent even for someone who can't speak
Japanese... I mean, just look at this... Point is, the official translation is bogus -- Johto doesn't
mean "lattice-shaped palace." That doesn't even make sense. The truth is, according to Masuda
in his mother tongue, Johto actually means "the capital of castles." That does make sense, because
Johto's based on Masuda's walks through Kyoto, home to many of Japan's most famous castles.
Gold & Silver were originally supposed to launch in 1997, but the complete transformation
after Masuda took over meant it got delayed all the way to '99. There was also the matter of
debugging, which took six months all on its own. When they started debugging, they didn't
even know what Pokemon were gonna make it into the final game. According to Watanabe in one
of those magazines, about 200 ended up in the trash. We already covered all the Space World
97 demo Pokemon in older videos, so today we're gonna highlight a few who got cut even later in
development. We commissioned some Sugimori-style watercolor from RacieBeep as per usual, who
did all that Space World art a few years back. But before we get to all that, a word from this
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dot com. And now back to the cut Pokemon… The 2020 leak didn't include these Pokemon's
names, but according to Game Freak, a lot of em never had names to begin with -- so
let's start with this scrapped Tanuki Pokemon. Western Nintendo fans mostly know tanukis from Tom
Nook in Animal Crossing, or Mario's Tanuki Suit, but it's actually a real-life animal native to
Japan, nicknamed raccoon dogs. This Pokemon's a reference to one tanuki in particular --
the villain of a Japanese folktale called Kachi-Kachi Yama. It's pretty weird, but to sum
it up, a farmer finds a tanuki in his fields, so he traps it to cook for dinner later. When
the farmer leaves for town, the tanuki begs the farmer's wife to set him free. She takes pity,
but once it's free, it kills her, chops her up, and later tricks her husband into eating her
flesh in a soup. Gross. Anyway, the farmer's got a rabbit friend, who swears vengeance, and later
when the tanuki's carrying some firewood on his back, the rabbit sets it ablaze. That's usually
the cover on storybook versions of the folktale, and that's what this Pokemon was -- the deranged,
tortured tanuki from Kachi-Kachi Yama. There was also this cute ghost flanked by a couple
hitodama. In Japanese folklore, hitodama balls of fire that're dead people's souls separated
from their bodies. That's why the ghost's purple fires have little faces -- hitodama literally
translates into English as "souls of the dead." Conversely, this Stork Pokemon with a baby in its
beak was based on Western folklore. Exact origins of the myth are disputed, but likely began in
medieval Europe, where human couples often married in summer. Also in summer, storks flew away
on 9 month migrations, then returned with baby chicks at the same time humans were having their
honeymoon babies. Storks also stay faithful to one mate for their entire lives, and they're friendly
towards humans, so they make for good role models in traditional societies. More importantly
though, most parents don't wanna tell their kids where babies really come from -- and that's how
folklore that storks delivered babies was born, with this Pokemon being a Poké-adaptation of
that medieval myth. This next one was a middle stage between Natu and Xatu. The sprite leak was
black and white, but Natu and Xatu were brown in Tajiri's Gen 2, so their middle evolution was
probably brown as well. After Masuda took over, the birds were changed to green, so if it hadn't
got cut, the mid-stage presumably would've ended up green too. We'll do a few more rapid-fire.
Like this flying squirrel with a sheathed sword and a ninja motif -- but the flying squirrel that
ultimately made it into Gen 2 was Sentret instead. There was also this Foxtail Pokemon, who may've
wound up turning into Furret. This little dinosaur got cut, but a similar design made it into Gen 4
as Cranidos. Likewise, this cyclops scorpion looks a lot like Gen 4's Skorupi. And this Koala Pokemon
appears it was sorta recycled to make Komala in Gen 7. There was also a boar with antlers,
a long-tongued frog, this rabbity Pikachuy thing -- and maybe the strangest of em all -- this
monstrous skeleton Pokemon. We're gonna debunk a couple big Gen 2 rumors here in a minute,
but since we're already in rapid-fire mode, first we wanna toss out some random trivia we
found in these magazines. Like that Gold & Silver were simplified for art director Ken Sugimori's
dad. Sugimori let his pops play some Gen 1, but he couldn't even figure out how to leave the
first house. So Sugimori had them simplify Gen 2 for folks like his old man -- like making the UI
dummy-proof and having the Select button bring out your bike. See, haters? Pokemon's not a kids'
game... it's for really really old people, too. Sugimori also made a Pokemon
based on his childhood pet bird, who surprised him one time by standing on
one foot. If you haven't figured it out yet, it was Hoothoot -- Sugimori said it was his
favorite Johto Pokemon. He also wanted to simplify all the Pokemon sprites from 4 colors down to
2, but the other devs called it an impossible request. Here's what Pikachu and Lugia might've
looked like in that style, compared to how they ended up looking in the release version. Seemingly
Sugimori wanted ‘em that way not to save space, but for minimalistic design sensibilities. They
don't look great, but maybe would've looked better on a tiny Game Boy with no backlight...
in Sugimori's opinion. The devs also say adding Kanto was an impulsive decision early in
development -- someone just said it'd be cool, so they went and did it. It was already in that
early Tajiri version, but all squeezed into the size of a single city. One of these magazines also
shows Koji Nishino's business card -- Snorlax is based on Nishino, so he proudly displays the
Pokemon on his card. Actually, all the devs have Pokemon on their cards -- they've changed
over the years, but at one point Tajiri had Ho-oh Sugimori had Venusaur, and Masuda had Psyduck,
though he later changed it to Pikachu and Pichu. Okay now we're gonna debunk a couple
long-running, popular rumors about Gen 2, starting with the oft-repeated claim that Gold
& Silver were originally planned to be the last Pokemon games ever made. Here's a 2010 Destructoid
article titled: "Pokemon Gold & Silver were meant to be the series finale." In 2019 TheGamer
said: "Gold & Silver were once planned to be the final games in the series." The same thing
from ScreenRant in 2022. Not just gaming outlets, a lot of fans believe it too. Here's a
Reddit thread called "Today I learned Gold & Silver were supposed to be the final
games in the series, effectively ending the Pokémon franchise for good." Almost two thousand
upvotes. GameFAQ threads, NeoSeeker -- it's all over the internet. We could go on, but you get
the point: it's been a persistent rumor for over a decade. But it just ain't true. In a July 2000
issue of Nintendo Online Magazine we translated, originally published before Gold & Silver'd
even released outside Japan, series creator Satoshi Tajiri and now-president of The Pokemon
Company explain Gen 2's development. The interview asks if Gold & Silver is the end of the story.
Tajiri says flat-out: "No, it’s not the end." So how'd the rumor even start? As the basis for
their claims, those aforementioned news articles cite a 2010 interview, where Ishihara said: "I
worked with the assumption that after we put out Gold and Silver, my work as far as Pokémon
was concerned would be done... I didn't intend to make any more Pokémon titles." But he's
just saying he was done, not the franchise. Throughout that same interview, Ishihara goes on
to say: "For me, Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver represented the finish line... I didn't intend to
make any more Pokémon titles... it would be time for me to do something else." Every Pokemon game
up to that point was made by 10 or 20 developers, and sold in the tens of millions -- they were
ridiculously profitable. A lot of development was literally done out of a house -- they
didn't even have to pay for office space. Game Freak would've been swimming in cash even
if they were only selling one million. Ishihara wasn't a developer -- he did do some consultation
on the games, but first and foremost he was the guy who sold merchandise and licensing deals.
He was worried Pokemon fever was cooling off, so if sales really did drop significantly,
there wouldn't have been boatloads of merch and licensing anymore. So he was considering moving
on and taking his business skills elsewhere -- but ultimately decided, quote: "I couldn’t very
well get off the ride halfway through." Pokemon was a monster IP
in every sense of the word, and Gold & Silver were never gonna be the end
of it. Of all the parallel universes out there, not even one of em would've seen Game Freak go
back to making games like Quinty and Pulseman. The other rumor we wanna debunk -- and we say this
with nothing but love for Satoru Iwata -- was that he wrote a compression algorithm that increased
the storage space in Gold & Silver. Some versions of the rumor even say Kanto couldn't've been
squeezed in without him. TechRadar, Kotaku, and lots of websites published articles saying
Iwata crammed a whole country into Gen 2. Heck, even we said it in an old video... whoops. But
most folks could be forgiven for thinking the rumor was true, because an old Game Freak
interview and even some in-game dialogue in Ultra Sun & Moon seemed to confirm it,
where Morimoto's in-game character says: "When we were told halfway through development to
make Kanto too, I thought I might just expire on the spot! When we were having trouble fitting all
the data in for Gold & Silver, and we were really in a pinch, this amazing guy came along and made
a program for us that solved all our problems. He went on to become the amazing president
of a real big company soon after that, too." To get to the truth, you can't just look at
interviews on record -- you've gotta actually dig through Gen 2's data. Doing so reveals that
Iwata did write an algorithm for Gold & Silver, but it actually decreased the amount of storage
space by a few percentage points. In other words, Kanto made it into Gen 2 in spite of his
algorithm. They could've added even more real estate if they stuck with Gen 1's algorithm... so
why didn't they? Well, Iwata's algorithm wasn't built for size. It was built for speed. Right
now, on the left you're seeing the compression algorithm from the '97 Tajiri version of Gold,
which used the same compression algorithm Gen 1 used. On the right, you're seeing Masuda's final
release version, using Iwata's algorithm. Iwata's compression saves a fraction of a second at the
start of the battle, another fraction when the Pokemon come out, and lots of other places.
Basically, it all comes down to faster load times. We don't wanna bog you down in too much
technical jargon, but his Gen 2 algorithm was a tweaked version of a 1989 algorithm used
in Earthbound and other HAL Labs games, the company Iwata was programmer then president
of before he became president of Nintendo. In the code, Iwata himself calls it a "high speed"
algorithm. The real reason Game Freak was able to squeeze in Kanto was because they upgraded
to 1 megabyte Game Boy cartridges for Gen 2, while the earlier games only had half a megabyte.
In other words, they doubled the cartridge size. A big thanks to Lord Danimal and Team Spaceworld
founder San-kwee for showing us this code -- we wouldn't have even thought to go digging
without em. They showed us about 5 years ago, but it felt inappropriate to share so soon after
Iwata's tragic passing. Now enough time's gone by, we hope it doesn't feel disrespectful. He may
not have given us a whole extra region in Gen 2, but he did save us from annoyingly-long
load times, so for that Iwata-san, we thank you. At the end of one of those Japanese
magazine interviews, they ask Game Freak that now Gold & Silver's finished, if they felt like
they'd completed the games they wanted to make. They all said in unison: "Not even close!" Masuda
continued, saying: "To us, they don't feel fully complete." They'd pushed the Game Boy Color to
its limits, but there's still so much more they wanted to do. In another translated interview,
Tajiri said: "I'm thinking ‘the best Pokemon game’ will be released sooner rather than later. But
whether or not it’ll be ‘the best Pokemon game’ is something I can't achieve on my own. From here
on out, kids who grew up playing may grow up to be game developers, right? And if those kids have
the same vision as us, then I definitely think it’s possible to expand the world of Pokemon by
working together with them." Tajiri's prediction came true -- the day Gold & Silver released in
Japan, a young man was in line at the store at 7am waiting to buy them. Ten years later, he was art
director on the remakes HeartGold & SoulSilver. His name? Takao Unno. If you wanna learn
lots more about those remakes, make sure'n subscribe -- we're gonna have a dedicated
HeartGold SoulSilver video coming up soon. Until then... did you also know your house in
Gen 2 is playing Dragon Ball on TV, but only in the French version? For more changes made to Gen
2 all around the world, in every localization, click the video on-screen. Or if you'd
rather watch a full hour of Pokemon trivia, click the other video. Special thanks
to our translator, proofreaders, artist, and most of all, thank you for
watching. See ya next time.
