No games have inspired more blatant misinformation, perhaps, than Pokemon Red & Blue. The games hit North American shelves back in ’98, right at the dawn of near-ubiquitous internet access. This was long before the average user could tell the difference between an Authoritative Source and some random jerk’s gif-strewn Geocities page. Random jerks with gif-strewn Geocities pages tended to make use of this fact.
What’s more, the games had already been out in Japan for 2 years at this point… meaning there was a vast body of unexplained images from the TV series, the card game, and other tie-ins that the aforementioned jerks could pore over and misinterpret. An early glimpse of unremarkable Water-type Pokemon Marril from the first Pokemon movie took on new life in the fandom as Pikablu, mightiest of the Pokegods, whose azure thunder might someday shake all Kanto to its core.
Naturally, when evidence of Pokemon Green came to light, people got to talking. What was this strange Japan-only release? Could the game be the key we needed to unlock the mysterious Mew? The secret to puzzling out that Hellraiser Rubik’s cube they called Missingno.?!
The truth is pretty common knowledge now: Red & Green were just the original Japanese titles for Red & Blue! The Japanese Blue version was a spin-off produced a little later, featuring updated art, new monster arrangements, and a new version of famed Mewtwo hangout “The Unknown Dungeon”. The NA release of Red & Blue combined the casts of Pokemon from the original two games with all the updated features found in Blue. So, one could say that we got all 3 games, in a mere 2 packages.
But wait – if you think about it, what this really means is that we didn’t get ANY of the original Japanese Pokemon games! Since the Pokemon games we grew up playing were modded versions of Pokemon Blue, English-speaking fans will never get to see the original Unknown Dungeon, the Blue version’s alternate Pokemon selection, or – most tragically – the art that Game Freak originally devised for the series back in ’96.
Enjoy, dear readers, the following sample… of what may have been:
– CC
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