AMERICANIZE POKEMON

visit Nintendo.com

Now role playing games for the Gameboy system in America were never popular, and it became another hard sell to get NINTENDO OF AMERICA interested in bringing Japan’s newest hit here to this country.

It didn’t help that the first story about Pokemon in the media was “CARTOON MONSTER ATTACKS KIDS” in Japan, but the story blew over and Nintendo allayed the American company’s misgivings, and they went with it.

For the Television series in this country the characters and monsters names were Westernized. For the lead character, Satoshi (named after its creator) was changed to ASH. Such characters as HITOKAGE a salamander with a ball of fire on his tail, was now called CHARMANDOR; FUSHIGIDANE, a dinosaur with a green garlic looking bulb on his back was called BULBASAUR; and ZENIGAME, a turtle with the ability to squirt water, became SQUIRTLE.

When the TV show began playing on American television sets in September of 1998 , within a few months it became a ratings winner. At the same time, the kids were getting excited about the characters and storylines of the Pokemon series, and Nintendo unleashed their electronic Pokemon games for the Holidays, and made licensing sales history.

The two versions of the game are called POKEMON RED or POKEMON BLUE. Both games are the same, only minus certain characters, so again you have to trade your characters via a link by a wire from one Nintendo Game Boy to another.

The game has you choose from one of the three tamed “starter” Pokemon at the beginning to help capture the 150 monsters in 15 different categories. What adds to the additives of the trading is that you can also customize your Pokemon by training them differently as they grow and evolve.

If you think the Trading Card frenzy is bad in this country, the trading of electronic Game Boy images in Japan is even more outrageous.