Pokemon Red GAMEBOY

Pokemon Red, released in Japan in 1996 alongside its counterpart Pokemon Green (Blue outside Japan), is the game that started the franchise — and it was nearly cancelled during its six-year development. Creator Satoshi Tajiri built the concept around his childhood hobby of insect collecting, reimagined as capturing and trading creatures using the Game Boy’s link cable, a peripheral most other developers treated as an afterthought.

The core loop is deceptively simple: explore the Kanto region, catch wild Pokemon in Poke Balls, train them through turn-based battles, and challenge eight Gym Leaders on the way to the Pokemon League. But the design hook was social rather than mechanical — Red and Blue each contained different exclusive Pokemon, making trading with a friend functionally required to complete the Pokedex, which turned the game into a reason to bring your Game Boy to school.

It released in North America in 1998, well after the Game Boy Color had already launched, and still became one of the best-selling games on the original hardware — proof that the concept, not the graphics, was what carried it.