– Game Freak’s Junichi Masuda.
Japanese developer Game Freak is releasing a pair of new Pokemon games for Nintendo’s 3DS next month, Pokemon Sun and Pokemon Moon.
But this year has already seen the release of arguably its most significant Pokemon game, one that shook the industry and became a pop culture phenomenon: Pokemon Go.
Thus it’s perhaps not surprising (though definitely intriguing, from a game dev perspective) that in a recent interview with Game Informer, longtime Game Freak staffer Junichi Masuda (who’s worked on pretty much every Pokemon game since the original Red and Blue, including Go) acknowledges that the remarkable success of Niantic and The Pokemon Company’s augmented-reality mobile game is now influencing the way Game Freak plans to develop core Pokemon games.
“With Pokémon Go, yeah, we definitely want to have some kind of – at some point – some kind of connectivity, some way the games can interact,” Masuda told Game Informer. “We want to have a kind of way to connect the two, or have a way for people who enjoyed one to enjoy some of their progress in the other. But that will definitely come down the road.”
So while the connection between Go and Sun/Moon will be minimal, if not nonexistent (Sun/Moon development began before Go was released), it seems likely that Game Freak will now be working to unite the Pokemon audience across mobile devices and more traditional game consoles. That’s a significant shift for the studio, albeit one that’s totally understandable in light of the reports that Pokemon Go’s success this summer inspired a significant surge in sales of both mainline Pokemon 3DS games and sales of the 3DS itself.
For more insight from Masuda and fellow Game Freaker Shigeru Ohmori about everything from the design philosophy of Pokemon games to the uncanny resemblance between a new mongoose-esque Pokemon and Donald Trump, check out the full interview over on Game Informer’s website.
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2016