Far and away, what developer Game Freak is best know for is, of course, the Pokemon franchise, but a recently unearthed guide is giving fans a look at what the company got up to before it struck gold. While it's known in some circles that the minds behind the famous monster-training franchise were in the magazine business, little information is available regarding exactly what sort of content Game Freak publications contained.In the early 1980s, the magazine was founded by freelance writer Satoshi Tajiri. He was soon joined by illustrator Ken Sugimori, who had already become a fan of the magazine. Tajiri would later see enormous success as the creator of the Pokemon series, and Sugimori, as the franchise's main character designer and art director, would go on to craft many fan-favorite Pokemon characters. But that wouldn't happen until the 90s, and the company wasn't any more than a humble gaming magazine until 1989.The 6 intervening years from founding to transformation have been somewhat of a historical mystery, but now a piece of the puzzle has been uncovered. Twitter user Picto made a post stating that they'd scanned and uploaded the entirety of an early Game Freak guide to Internet Archive. The guide, released in 1985, was for the arcade game The Fairytale Story, released earlier the same year. Though lacking the popularity to be among the classic arcade games that can still be played today, it was at least noteworthy enough to see the development of a thorough guide from Game Freak.
The post gives a hint as to the issue's contents, showing the cover page with the game's protagonist, the witch Ptolemy, pushing a cake. The game was a platformer, in which Ptolemy would turn her enemies into cakes and push them off ledges to defeat them. Though far from resembling more modern platformer games, at the time it was compared to the classic Bubble Bobble, mostly favorably. The guide itself is a 44-page issue detailing enemies, items, strategies, and all the game's maps, which number 101 in total. The text is written largely in Japanese, so the details will be lost on most western readers, but the thoroughness and quality seem evident nonetheless.
Windows like this in the lost history of video games are rare and valuable. Nintendo has been criticized for destroying gaming history, and the company is one of the three entities that established Game Freak's publisher, The Pokemon Company. The industry giant might not be a reliable source for the uncovering and preservation of history, even for properties that it's tied to. If that's the case, it will be up to the enterprising fan community to do the important leg work.
With Pokemon Scarlet and Violet releasing soon, the company is a far different beast than it once was. And despite any success Game Freak may have seen in its early days, it's safe to say that most gamers are grateful the founders decided to change course.
Source: Internet Archive