OG Pokemon devs struggled to fit their iconic RPG onto a Game Boy cartridge: "It was a fight against capacity, a fight against what we could fit onto the cartridge"

The original Pokemon games, originally Pocket Monsters Red and Green in Japan, are some of the most formative RPGs of all time, but if the original Game Boy's game cartridges had just a little bit less memory, they may have never existed.

Playing the recently released Switch and Switch 2 versions of the Pokemon LeafGreen and FireRed remakes, I'm genuinely astounded that Game Freak managed to pack so much RPG into a literal Game Boy game, and according to the game's original programmer, Junichi Masuda, it was a near-constant struggle.

"That was an overriding theme – it was a fight against capacity, a fight against what we could fit onto the cartridge," Masuda said as part of an old interview with games™ (a sister publication to Retro Gamer). "We had designed these 150-odd Pokemon to get in as well."

Nowadays, the folks at Game Freak have plenty of console memory to stuff as many mons into new Pokemon games as they want, but they have to put a cap on the amount to ensure reasonable development times. But back in the Game Boy era, developers had to worry about things like... movement.

"But then we had the problem of movement, so we came up with the idea of the map tiles being the things that moved while the character was animated in place," added Masuda. "With these ideas, we found ways to squeeze as much in as we possibly could. I like the Game Boy as a machine but trying to work with all these challenges and make a game that anyone could get into and enjoy was difficult."

Coming back to Pokemon Yellow 30 years later is like coming home – and playing it in 2026 is even better than when I was a kid