Former Nintendo of America staff discuss “adversarial relationship” with Pokemon U.S.

Former Nintendo of America staffers have shared some interesting behind-the-scenes information about what it was like working in collaboration with The Pokemon Company, with the relationship described as being “adversarial”.

Kit Ellis and Krysta Yang shared the details during a recent episode of their podcast. Yang brought up how there was a “tug of war for control”. Ellis also brought up about how The Pokemon Company hammered in on pronunciations and was particular about even the finest details of its creatures.

Below is what was shared during the podcast about the relationship between Nintendo of America and The Pokemon Company in the U.S.:

Kit: We really can’t undersell the kind of at times adversarial relationship that there was… it kind of depended on what branch you were dealing with, because we would interact with Game Freak developers when they would come over and they were great and wonderful, and very sweet and nice. Even The Pokemon Company in Japan when you would get a glimpse of them they seemed okay, but it was really the U.S. teams that were very… there were really like a lot of butting heads moments.

Krysta: Some of the people that were on the U.S. Pokemon team used to work at Nintendo and there were several of them that had to leave their jobs at Nintendo because they moved the sales and marketing office to Redwood City. There was a little bit of salt. A little bit, I think, at some times. There’s this layer of adversarial energy, but also this layer of competition, which was very prevalent throughout the NoA regions.

… There was definitely that energy a little bit between the U.S. Pokemon company and NoA as well – this kind of tug of war for control. Like “if you’re talking about video games, you gotta involve us. We need to be able to make sure that this shows properly on our systems, we need to make sure that we have involvement.” And they’re like, “well we’re not talking about video games, we’re talking about the brand so you can’t be involved. So go away, stop talking to us.” It was like that relationship around it that made it a little tension.

Kit: This was also something that changed around this time, but letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law. Like “We’re cracking down on your pronunciations”. And we would have Reggie (former Nintendo of America president) do a video and they’re like, “Reggie needs to rerecord this.” We’re not going to rerecord. It’s close, it’s Reggie, we can’t get on his schedule, you’re just going to have to deal with it. “We’re going to hold a grudge about this.”

And they were melting down my beautiful ice sculptures. Like “Oh, Oshawott’s toenail isn’t quite to proportion, melt him all down.” There was a lot of stuff of that ilk.

Something else brought up is a video that the Nintendo of America team Kit and Krysta were on needed to watch, which had a person listing 300 Pokemon pronouncing their names. Also, there were certain requirements The Pokemon Company had such as referring to the initial Pokemon players can pick from as “Partner Pokemon”, which had to be in a certain order and there was a strict rule against referring to them as “starters”. These Pokemon also had to be included as a group of three – not just one.

In other Pokemon news, we heard this week that when the series was being localized for the first time, there was at least some consideration into turning it into a gritty baseball game. We posted about that here.