Game Freak looks back on the development of Yoshi and Pokemon Red/Blue

Game Freak's latest YouTube video takes a double-dip into Nintendo's earlier days. The video focuses on both the NES title Yoshi, and Pokemon Red/Blue. Check out a summary of the video's info below.

- items on Yoshi‘s main menu will move accordingly to the music, which was programmed by Masuda
- Ken Sugimori came up with the gameplay for Yoshi
- Game Freak wanted to add in a realistic sounding Yoshi voice, but it got turned down by Nintendo
- Masuda learned about the “wave” design of difficulty curve during the creation of this game
- wave design is where after a particularly hard stage, an easier stage comes after to let players bask in the accomplishment
- Masuda says developing and balancing them feels like taste-testing in cooking, where you can try it and tweak immediately
- for RPGs, the usage of time is different, as it takes maybe 3 hours before you really get into the groove
- Masuda remembers how shocked people were when finding out just how fast storage capacity limits would improve
- Masuda says there are some good things about having limited memory
- for example, if memory was infinite, devs would probably keep adding in new things and the game would never get done
- there were fun things that could be done thanks to memory limits
- this included thinking of Pokemon names that could be fit in the 5-character limit (in Japanese)
- in order to get the voices of the original 151 Pokemon done, Masuda had to use certain tricks in order for it to work
- Masuda says he would probably have been told off it he weren’t the main programmer on the game