How a Failing Nintendo Accessory Spawned the $100 Billion Pokémon Empire

Without Nintendo’s Game Boy Link Cable, Pokémon would have never sold hundreds of millions of video games, printed tens of billions of trading cards, and had hundreds of millions of people play Pokémon Go. But how exactly did Nintendo’s once-failing peripheral lead to the creation of one of gaming’s most iconic brands, one that has stood the test of time for 30 years? This is the story of how a simple cable spawned a $100 billion empire.

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The Game Link

It’s April 1989. The hottest device on the market is Nintendo’s Game Boy, instantly selling hundreds of thousands of units thanks to its revolutionary ability to play games anywhere. But despite its tiny, personal-sized screen, the Game Boy experience wasn’t intended to be a lonely one. A peripheral designed to link multiple Game Boys together also arrived at launch: the Game Link Cable. But while that length of wire unlocked a whole world of multiplayer possibilities, it went largely uncelebrated: most early adopters were using their Game Boys to play hit games like Tetris and Super Mario Land solo. The Game Link Cable was anything but a must-buy accessory.

Eight years and more than 130 games came and went, and during that time Nintendo and its development partners failed to create a truly “killer app” for the Game Link. While Bomberman and Street Fighter 2’s versus modes pushed the limits of the Game Link Cable’s real-time data transfer capabilities, most games on the Game Boy were still designed and sold as single-player experiences with an additional scaled-down multiplayer component.

Enter Game Freak co-founder Satoshi Tajiri, who saw the potential in this largely ignored length of wire and plastic. He had an idea that would completely change the cable’s fortunes. He just needed a little help.

Capsule Monsters

During his youth, Satoshi Tajiri was obsessed with bugs. Growing up in suburban Tokyo, he became so engrossed by wandering through forests and collecting insects that he was once referred to as “Dr. Bug”. Eventually the forests he once foraged in were urbanized, but his love for collecting the smallest of creatures never faded.

Fast forward to 1990. Tariji, now the co-founder of developer Game Freak, pitched Nintendo a game where players would capture monsters in pocket-sized capsules and trade their collection with friends. And how would you trade with friends? Taijiri planned to use what he considered to be the Game Boy’s most underappreciated accessory, the Game Link Cable. He’d always imagined bugs crawling along the wire, from one Game Boy to another, when watching two people play together on the train. The real heart of the idea, though, stemmed from Tajiri’s experience with Dragon Quest 2, which saw him trying and ultimately failing to earn a rare item. He wished that he could just trade for the item with a friend instead of trying to earn it himself. These two thoughts eventually became the core building blocks of the original pitch for “Capsule Monsters.”

The pitch was met with skepticism due to the ambitious nature of the project. Nintendo struggled to see the appeal since nothing like this had ever been done before. Thankfully, Shigeru Miyamoto – Nintendo’s famed designer who’d pitched The Legend of Zelda based on his own childhood adventures in the countryside – took a liking to Tajiri’s idea and helped convince Nintendo to give Capsule Monsters the green light, as well as offer his services as a producer. With the backing of an industry legend, a new franchise was about to be born… one that would never have existed without the Game Link Cable.

Miyamoto suggested that something extra was needed to truly realize the potential of trading monsters and encourage use of the feature. In a moment of brilliance, he suggested introducing multiple versions of the game with slight variations to the available monsters so players would need to trade with each other in order to catch them all.

“At first, there were no plans for the different Red/Blue carts,” Miyamoto revealed in a contribution to the Satoshi Tajiri Biographical Manga, released in 2018. “It was going to just be a single cart, but I wanted to do something a little more creative for this. Since the core of the game was catching and trading Pokémon, creating two different cart versions which had slightly different chances for each Pokémon to appear would encourage and necessitate friends to trade with each other, and make the whole experience more fun.”

Tajiri also hoped that this approach would create a way for players to develop friendships through the heavy use of the Game Link Cable, since Capsule Monsters’ endgame required trading and battling other people in the real world. “It struck me as a novel use of the Game Boy hardware, a new gameplay experience that couldn’t be had on any other system,” Miyamoto said.

Unlike the majority of Game Boy games, which were made within the space of one or two years, Capsule Monsters – which would eventually be renamed “Pocket Monsters” for Japan and, finally, Pokémon – took a staggering five years to develop. It was an ambitious project that pushed the limits of the system, and that demanded both time and money: Tajiri even stopped taking a salary in order to help with studio costs. To keep the lights on and maintain its grand vision for Pokémon, Game Freak also took on other projects, such as developing Yoshi on the NES and Mario & Wario on the Super Nintendo.

Studio admin wasn’t the only hurdle. A Game Boy cartridge’s 1MB storage capacity posed a significant roadblock for Game Freak’s original vision. Early design documents suggest that there were well over 150 creatures pitched for the game, and while some of those were redesigned and merged into the core 150 pocket monsters featured in Pokémon Red and Green, this reduced roster was still simply too much for the Game Boy’s 1MB cartridge. To shrink the game down to size, Game Freak cut back on content: many monsters, miles of map, and battle system modifiers such as dark and steel-type Pokémon were all stripped away.

Frequent gameplay and presentation changes also slowed development. The original design placed heavier emphasis on trading, selling, and aggressively training Pokémon, and all that was toned down. The original pitch documents envisioned players would capture Pokémon using a charisma stat, and be more active in Pokémon battles by using a whip. For perhaps obvious reasons the whip was taken away (Pokémon is a kids game, after all), along with that sweet-talking capture system.

Despite all these hurdles and the studio nearly shutting down, after six years of development Pokémon Red and Green was released in the spring of 1996. It would not only provide a much-needed boost to the ageing Game Boy, but finally breathe life into its neglected Game Link Cable.

Gotta Catch ‘Em All

The Game Link Cable was not only partly responsible for the creation of Pokémon, but proved to be an integral part of the game’s DNA over successive generations. Ever since its humble beginning, every mainline Pokémon game has seen players catch Pokémon so they can train them up for battle. Some Pokémon can only evolve through trading, while others only exist on one version of each game, such as Growlithe on Pokémon Blue, and Meowth on Red. From the start, if you wanted to complete your Pokedex, you needed the Game Link Cable.

Despite its intrinsic value to Pokémon, though, the Game Link Cable wasn’t a very sophisticated piece of tech. In its first iteration, the cable was only capable of moving a whopping 1kb of data per second. 1kb is roughly the size of a 150-200 word email, which is, ironically, about the length of this script I’m using to describe the Game Link’s transfer speed. A 1MB file —1,000 kilobytes — would take about 17 minutes to download over the Game Link. Combined with the limited tech powering the Game Boy, Game Freak had to be very clever with how multiplayer features worked.

Battles and trading in the first generation of Pokémon games were never real-time, but also never felt as slow as 1kb/s would suggest. Two Game Boys’ peer-to-peer connection allowed players to send each other small packets of information that were only a few bits in size. If player Red attacked player Blue, the games wouldn’t display that in real time, but rather Red’s cartridge would send a small amount of data to Blue, Blue would then accept and confirm that the package was secured, they would shake hands, and then both games would simultaneously play their battle animations, calculate damages, and apply status effects. This would repeat until the battle was won.

Trading, on the other hand, was far more difficult. While the actual trade itself would take a split second, the verification process and handshake between the two Game Boys would require redundancy checks and confirmations to avoid data corruption. Which is why, as a kid, I may or may not have abused this system in order to clone an entire team of Blastoise by yanking the cable from my Game Boy in the middle of a transfer. This slow verification process is why the game featured a longer-than-usual animation showing the traded Pokémon traveling through the cable itself, just like Satoshi Tajiri had imagined while watching two people play Tetris on a train.

You could argue, though, that Pokémon’s success wasn’t just down to technical innovation, but rather its marriage with its branding. “Gotta catch ’em all” was a brilliant slogan. Not only did it encourage completionists to buy two copies of the same game, it also made the Game Link an essential companion. The cable finally had its killer app, eight years after it launched. Sure, you could play Pokémon without a link cable, but if you wanted the complete experience, the Game Link Cable was crucial.

And the cable’s legacy persists to this day. Combat had to be turn-based in the original version of Pokémon to accommodate the cable’s limitations, but that battle format remains one of the core pillars of the mainline games today, despite industry progress. Real time battles on a massive scale and mass trading could be achieved with ease in 2026, but would it still feel like Pokémon? The limitations of the original Game Boy hardware have hard-coded Pokémon’s DNA. Changing that would alter the core experience that fans still cherish today. While spin-offs and adjacent games have introduced more robust combat and less tedious ways to trade monsters, the fundamentals dictated by the Game Link cable’s limitations remain deeply rooted in the Pokémon of today.

Over three decades, the Pokémon franchise has seen over 489 million games sold. Pokémon cards have become their own micro-economy, with many listed for millions of dollars. The series has entered the mainstream with major Hollywood movies, a long-running anime, and dozens of spin-off shows, manga, and amusement parks. If you can name it, there’s probably a version with a Pokémon on it.

While it’s hard to think of a world without Charizard, Pikachu, or the 1,000+ other creatures the series has created, it’s even stranger to think that if it wasn’t for Nintendo’s previously ignored cable, and one man’s vision to translate his childhood memories of bug catching into a game, Pokémon may have never existed.