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It may be a pop culture phenomenon now (complete with its own LEGO set), but Pokémon was once a totally new property that shook up the established RPG formula. Getting that many creatures with that many unique abilities and progressions took a lot of work to get it to work on the Game Boy. At a recent awards show, one Pokémon developer admitted it wasn’t always easy to make the games work.

Speaking at the New York Game Awards, Tsunekazu Ishihara spoke about turning the “simple concept" of Pokémon into a worldwide phenomenon. And he would know: Ishihara was a producer on the very first Pokémon titles before becoming President and CEO of The Pokémon Company. The core concept, according to him, was deceptively simple.

“The development process, however, was not quite as easy,” Ishihara said during the New York Game Awards. “It took a great deal of trial and error to figure out how to actualize this idea with the limited resources we had available. In the end, it took six years to complete the first games, Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green. Still, we all felt confident in the main gameplay elements that would become the foundation of the Pokémon video game series: catch, raise, trade, and battle.”

The developers were right to believe in the formula, with Pokémon still going strong nearly 30 years after its initial release in Japan. Despite relying heavily on “trial and error” to bring the game’s systems to life, the gamble clearly paid off. Three decades later, and we’re still trying to catch them all.

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