Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong creator Shigeru Miyamoto has shared a story about the creation of the Pokemon franchise, and why most new entries tend to be split into two games.
Few series have the overwhelmingly strong sales numbers of Pokemon – the games are consistently best-sellers on their given platforms, with every Game Boy having its respective Pokemon game as its overall best-seller and every main series game cracking the top 10 of their console's sales. And according to the Wikipedia list of best-selling franchises it's only beaten by Mario, Tetris, and Call of Duty in terms of sales.
In a recent shareholders meeting (roughly translated by Genki_JPN on Twitter, and verified using machine translation) Miyamoto responds to a question about whether any Switch 2 game could surpass the sales of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. He shares a story about Pokemon creator Satoshi Tajiri, recalling that before Tajiri had created Pokemon Red and Green, he joked that if Nintendo wanted to surpass Mario, it wouldn't be possible unless the company found a way to sell two copies of a game to every customer. And then, of course, Tajiri did just that with Pokemon and it's two (or three, or four) different versions each generation.
Tajiri later proved he was right, given that combined sales of Pokemon's first generation were over 40 million, beating out every Mario game that isn't Mario Kart 8 or Super Mario Bros. While a majority of people will likely only buy one of the Pokemon games, there's a large margin who will double dip on every release, whether that be for themselves or parents buying for two children, and then of course there's usually a third entry to boost that number even higher.
