Everything We Know About The Cancelled Pokémon N64 Game
Pocket Monsters 64 was a mysterious game that only ever got a name, leaving fans to eternally wonder what Game Freak had planned.
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Pokémon Sword & Shield were important games in the Pokémon franchise, as they were the first mainline entries in the series to appear on a home console. Game Freak seemed averse to the idea of putting a mainline Pokémon game on anything other than a handheld console for the longest time, but at one point, there was a full-fledged Pokémon game planned for the N64.
Pokémon Red & Blue were a huge success for the Game Boy and fans who came into the series through the anime practically salivated at the thought of the series making the jump to the N64, which was Nintendo’s main home console at the time. Pokémon Red & Blue managed to be a success despite the limited graphical prowess of the Game Boy, but a home version had the chance to bring the series in line with what people had seen in the anime.
Game Freak had planned to create a full-fledged Pokémon title for the N64 in the past. According to the Lost Media Wiki, a game called Pocket Monsters 64 was mentioned in an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto in a ’97 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly and that it was planned to be released for the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive, along with Hey You, Pikachu!.
…And that’s it. Nothing else was ever heard of Pocket Monsters 64. The Nintendo 64 would go on to receive several Pokémon titles, and Bulbapedia speculates that Pocket Monster 64 could have been turned into Pokémon Stadium, but there is no proof that this decision was made.
So, what happened to Pocket Monsters 64? There are two obvious reasons as to why the game never made it far. The first is the decline of the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive, which quickly faltered in Japan and never even received an international release. A lot of games that were planned for the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive had to be reduced in scope, as they were remade to work on a standard N64 cartridge. Hey You, Pikachu! is one such title that had to be reworked in this manner. It’s possible that a Nintendo 64 cartridge couldn’t handle a full Pokémon RPG.
The other major factor can be seen in the year. Miyamoto discussed Pocket Monsters RPG in ’97, which is around the time that production had started on Pokémon Gold & Silver. We now know that those games had an incredibly tumultuous development period, which involved an almost total reworking of the game in order to include the Kanto region, as well as requiring direct help from Satoru Iwata in order to fit everything onto a standard Game Boy cartridge. Game Freak spent years trying to sort out Pokémon Gold & Silver, at a time when they still had an incredibly small team. It’s likely that Pocket Monsters RPG became less of a priority over time, and the death of the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive killed the project before it began.
One of the reasons why it took so long for the mainline Pokémon series to come to a home console is because Game Freak wanted to keep the social aspects of Pokémon at the forefront of the experience. The Nintendo Switch finally allowed for the best of both worlds, but we could have had a console Pokémon experience back in ’97 if things had turned out differently.
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