Shigeru Miyamoto shared an insightful anecdote behind the reasonings for The Pokemon Company selling two versions of the same game. Some time ago Pokemon creator, Satoshi Tajiri, playfully asked how they could surpass sales of the Mario franchise and suggested that selling two copies of the same game could help achieve this goal and lo and behold the Pokemon Dual Versions were created. Here’s what was said:
“A long time ago, Tajiri-san, the director of Pokémon, before creating the first Pokémon game, once joked to me, ‘If you want to surpass Nintendo’s Mario, you can’t surpass it unless you sell two copies of the game to each customer, That is also one of the reasons Pokémon Red and Green were born. Like this, there are people who think, ‘somehow let’s surpass it.’”
