Pokemon Red and Green took six years – Ishihara’s reminder that the “simple” stuff is hard

23 January 2026
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11 min.
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Pokemon Red and Green took six years – Ishihara’s reminder that the “simple” stuff is hard

Summary:

It’s funny how time can sand down the rough edges of history. Today, Pokemon Red and Green can look almost effortless from the outside: walk into tall grass, catch a creature, train it up, trade with a friend, battle your way forward. Clean loop, clear goal, instant classic. But at the New York Game Awards, Tsunekazu Ishihara pulled the curtain back on how messy that “clean” loop really was to build. He described a development process shaped by trial and error, limited resources, and the kind of stubborn optimism you only get when a small team believes a strange idea can work if they keep pushing it.

The most striking detail is the timeline. Ishihara said it took six years to complete the first games. Six years to make catching feel satisfying, raising feel personal, trading feel exciting, and battling feel readable on a Game Boy. That is not a quick win, and it’s not a straight line. It’s a long stretch of testing, reworking, trimming, and trying again, all while staying loyal to a core idea: catching creatures and swapping them with your friends should feel like the best parts of childhood, bottled into a cartridge.

What makes his comments stick is that they explain why the foundations still hold. Catch, raise, trade, battle is not just a slogan. It’s a set of mechanics tied to real human habits: collecting, caring, sharing, competing, and showing off a little. Ishihara’s reflection is a reminder that the things that feel “obvious” now often started as fragile prototypes that needed years of care before they could stand on their own. And once they did, the rest of history followed.

The Pokemon Red and Green moment at the New York Game Awards

Sometimes a franchise gets celebrated so often that it starts to feel like background noise – like a song you’ve heard a thousand times in a shop, even though it’s still a banger. The New York Game Awards moment cut through that. The Pokemon series received the Andrew Yoon Legend Award, and Ishihara used the spotlight to talk less about victory laps and more about the early struggle. That choice matters, because it frames Pokemon’s success as something earned through iteration, not something destined. When the person at the top says “this took years of trial and error,” it lands like a reality check. We aren’t just looking at a beloved set of games. We’re looking at a solved problem that used to be unsolved, back when the team had fewer tools, fewer people, and far less certainty about what would actually feel fun.

A small idea that changed everything

Ishihara’s description of Pokemon’s origin is almost disarmingly simple: catch creatures and trade them with your friends. That’s it. No long manifesto, no ten-page pitch about lore, no grand speech about saving the world. Just a playful question: wouldn’t it be fun if you could catch things and swap them? The reason that question is powerful is because it instantly creates a social picture in your head. You’re not alone on a quest – you’re comparing, negotiating, and bragging a little. You’re building a collection that has meaning because other people can see it and interact with it. That tiny spark also explains why Pokemon spread the way it did. The loop doesn’t end when you turn the console off. It follows you to school, to the playground, to the bus ride, and into whatever friend group is willing to argue about which monster is coolest.

Six years to make “simple” feel playable

Here’s the part that makes modern brains do a double take: Ishihara said it took six years to complete Pokemon Red and Pokemon Green. Six years for games that, today, can look straightforward on a screenshot. But “straightforward” is often what you get after the hard work is already done. When a mechanic feels obvious, it usually means somebody spent a long time removing the parts that felt awkward, confusing, or boring. Trial and error is the unglamorous engine behind that. We can imagine how many small questions had to be answered: How often should encounters happen? How many creatures is “enough” to make trading exciting? How do we teach battling without making it feel like homework? And how do we keep the pace moving when a handheld RPG can easily become slow, menu-heavy, and exhausting?

Limited resources, big decisions

Ishihara also pointed to limited resources, which is a polite way of saying “we didn’t have the luxury of brute-forcing everything.” On the Game Boy, every choice has a cost, and every extra idea fights for space and time. When resources are tight, design becomes a series of trade-offs: keep this, cut that, simplify here, add clarity there. That pressure can crush a project, or it can force it to become sharper. Pokemon’s early team had to chase fun inside a small box, and that box shaped the identity of the games. The world is readable, the goals are clear, and the mechanics are consistent enough that you can learn them through play. It’s like packing for a trip with one small bag. You bring only what matters, and if you do it right, you end up feeling lighter instead of limited.

The four pillars that held the whole thing up

When Ishihara lists the foundation as catch, raise, trade, and battle, it doesn’t sound like a marketing line – it sounds like a checklist the team used to stay sane. These pillars work because each one feeds the others. Catching gives you options, raising gives you attachment, trading gives you community, and battling gives you drama. Remove one, and the structure wobbles. Catch without battle can feel aimless. Raise without trade can feel lonely. Trade without catching can feel shallow. Battle without raising can feel disposable. The brilliance is how naturally the loop encourages you to keep moving. You catch something new, you want to see what it becomes, you want to test it, and you want to show it off. It’s a self-propelling machine that runs on curiosity and social energy.

Catch – the hook that keeps your eyes scanning grass

Catching is the first handshake. It’s the moment the game says, “Hey, you can have that.” Even now, that feeling still works because it’s built on anticipation. You don’t know what’s in the grass, and your brain starts filling in possibilities. The act of catching also turns random encounters into opportunities. Instead of feeling like obstacles, wild creatures become potential teammates, collectibles, or trade bait. That small shift changes the emotional tone of the whole journey. And because catching is tied to choice – do we risk another throw, do we weaken it more, do we spend the rare item – it creates stories naturally. We remember the one that got away, the one caught on the last possible try, and the one that became a surprise favorite. Catching isn’t just collecting. It’s tension, luck, and small triumphs stacked together.

Raise – the quiet rhythm that builds attachment

Raising is where the bond sneaks in. You start with a creature that is, honestly, kind of weak, and then you invest time. Battles become practice, victories become growth, and growth becomes identity. The creature stops being “a thing we caught” and becomes “our teammate.” That’s why the raising pillar matters so much to the long-term pull of the series. It mirrors the real-world satisfaction of nurturing something – plants, pets, hobbies, skills – and seeing it improve because you showed up consistently. It also adds weight to decisions. We don’t just swap a high-level partner without thinking, because time matters. Raising turns progress into a relationship, and that makes the journey feel personal instead of purely mechanical.

Trade – the social spark that made it feel real

Trading is where Pokemon stops being only a single-player adventure and turns into a shared world. Ishihara’s original framing – catch creatures and trade them with your friends – is basically the whole mood. Trading creates conversation. It creates negotiation. It creates a reason to care about what someone else found, not just what we found. It also turns collecting into a community activity, where missing pieces aren’t failures, they’re invitations. “Do you have this one?” is a question that instantly builds connection. Trading even adds a bit of playful economy. Some creatures become valuable because they’re rare, some become valuable because they evolve in a special way, and some become valuable because they’re simply cool and you want one. That social layer is not decoration. It’s core to why Pokemon spread so fast between people.

Designing for real friendships, not just menus

What’s clever is that trading pushes you toward real-world interaction. It’s not just a digital marketplace where you quietly press buttons and move on. It nudges you into asking, meeting up, and talking. That design choice turns the game into a bridge between players, which is unusual even now, let alone back then. It also means the game has to support communication without forcing it. Trading has to be simple enough that you can do it quickly, but meaningful enough that you actually want to do it. That balance is hard. If it’s too complicated, nobody bothers. If it’s too shallow, it feels pointless. Pokemon’s trading system sits in the sweet spot where the action is easy, but the consequences are interesting, and that’s why it became a cultural habit instead of a forgotten feature.

Why trading felt like playground magic

Trading works because it feels like swapping treasures you found outside. As kids, we trade bugs, cards, marbles, stickers, anything that feels collectible and a little scarce. Pokemon captured that exact emotional texture and put it on a screen. One creature can be common to you and rare to a friend, and suddenly it becomes a social token, not just data. The ritual matters too: the link, the moment of exchange, the little pause where both sides commit. It turns a decision into a memory. Even the occasional trade regret is part of the charm, like lending your favorite thing and immediately realizing you made a mistake. That’s real. That’s human. And that’s why this pillar helped Pokemon feel alive beyond the cartridge.

Battle – a ruleset that creates stories

Battling is the stage where everything shows off. It gives purpose to raising, urgency to catching, and bragging rights to trading. Battles also create structure. Without them, the world can feel like wandering. With them, each route, trainer, and gym becomes a checkpoint that says, “Let’s see what you’ve built.” What makes battling special is that it’s simple enough to understand, but layered enough to stay interesting. You can win with a favorite, you can win with strategy, or you can win with stubborn overleveling because you refuse to admit defeat. And because battles are repeatable, they become the natural language of competition between friends. Trading says “let’s share.” Battling says “let’s test.” Together, they turn a solo journey into a social rivalry that stays friendly, even when someone’s starter keeps sweeping your team and you pretend you’re totally fine.

Childhood experiences as a design compass

Ishihara connected these pillars to childhood experiences like catching bugs, growing plants, and raising animals. That detail matters because it explains why the mechanics feel intuitive. The game isn’t asking you to learn something alien. It’s asking you to revisit something familiar, but in a playful, exaggerated form. Catching becomes collecting. Raising becomes training. Trading becomes sharing. Battling becomes the dramatic, game-like version of competition. This is also why Pokemon appeals across ages. Kids get it immediately because it mirrors their world. Adults get it because it taps nostalgia without needing to explain itself. And because the mechanics are rooted in everyday feelings – curiosity, care, pride, envy, excitement – they stay readable even as graphics and systems evolve across generations.

Confidence without certainty

One of the most relatable parts of Ishihara’s reflection is that confidence in the core loop doesn’t mean certainty about success. You can believe in an idea and still struggle to make it work. You can feel the foundation is strong and still spend years fixing the walls so the house doesn’t wobble. That’s what “trial and error” really means in practice: testing small changes, learning what breaks, learning what confuses players, and then trying again. It also means choosing what not to do. When a project takes six years, it’s almost guaranteed that some ideas got left behind. The team’s confidence was in the pillars, not in every individual feature. That kind of focus is how long projects survive. When things get messy, you grab the parts that matter most and build outward from them, one stable step at a time.

The ripple effect we still feel today

Once those pillars were locked in, Pokemon became bigger than a single set of games. The catch, raise, trade, battle loop isn’t just a design choice, it’s a promise the series keeps making to players. It’s why someone can jump in years later and still feel oriented within minutes. It’s also why the community stays active, because the pillars naturally create conversation and comparison. What did you catch? What are you raising? What do you need? Who do you want to battle? Those are social questions disguised as gameplay, and they scale beautifully. Ishihara’s reminder that the early team fought to “actualize” the idea helps explain why the foundation feels sturdy. It was stress-tested for years. The loop wasn’t rushed into existence. It was shaped until it could carry the weight of millions of players doing wildly different things with the same basic tools.

The takeaway for anyone building games now

The modern era gives developers more tools, more platforms, and more ways to ship updates, but Ishihara’s story still hits because it’s timeless: the hardest part is making the “simple” idea feel great in your hands. Great loops often look obvious after the fact, which is unfair to the people who spent years making them work. The other lesson is that constraints can sharpen design. Limited resources forced focus. Focus protected the pillars. And the pillars created a loop that invited people to play together, not just play alone. If you’re making anything – a game, a product, even a hobby project you’re quietly proud of – there’s comfort in this. If it feels messy now, that doesn’t mean it’s broken. It might mean you’re still in the trial and error phase, sanding down rough edges until the experience feels natural. Pokemon didn’t become Pokemon because it was instantly perfect. It became Pokemon because the team kept iterating until the core felt undeniable.

Conclusion

Ishihara’s comments at the New York Game Awards are a reminder that iconic ideas don’t arrive fully formed. Pokemon started with a small, friendly question about catching creatures and trading them with friends, and then it took years of trial and error to make that question playable on limited resources. The result was a foundation built on catch, raise, trade, and battle – a loop tied to real childhood experiences that still feels intuitive decades later. When we look back at Pokemon Red and Green now, the magic isn’t that the games seem simple. The magic is that they were made to feel simple, after a long stretch of difficult decisions, repeated testing, and faith in a core idea that the team refused to let go.

FAQs
  • What did Tsunekazu Ishihara say about the original Pokemon games?
    • He explained that Pokemon began as a simple idea about catching creatures and trading them with friends, but turning that into a finished game required a great deal of trial and error with limited resources, and it took six years to complete Pokemon Red and Pokemon Green.
  • How long did Pokemon Red and Green take to develop?
    • Ishihara said it took six years to complete the first games, highlighting how much iteration was needed to make the core idea work.
  • What are the key gameplay elements Ishihara highlighted?
    • He pointed to the foundation of the series as catch, raise, trade, and battle, describing these as the main pillars the team believed in.
  • Why did Ishihara connect Pokemon’s mechanics to childhood experiences?
    • He linked the pillars to familiar childhood activities like catching bugs, growing plants, and raising animals, suggesting the mechanics feel natural because they mirror real experiences people understand.
  • What award was Pokemon recognized with at the New York Game Awards?
    • The series received the Andrew Yoon Legend Award, which recognizes major impact on the games industry.
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