Nintendo is usually thought of — rightly — as a company whose success is founded on controlling every facet of its products. It designs and manufactures Nintendo game consoles, which people primarily buy to play Nintendo games on; those games are often made in-house at Nintendo and feature characters, or belong to franchises, that Nintendo created and owns. In both tech and entertainment, companies with such total mastery over their product are rare — Disney and Apple might be the closest comparisons.
But there’s a glaring exception to this rule. Pokémon might be Nintendo’s most valuable property. By some (admittedly hard to verify) estimates, it’s the highest-grossing media franchise of all time, with coffers fed by ubiquitous merchandizing as well as game and trading card sales. (One report claims that Pokémon generated $12 billion in retail sales in 2024 alone.) But Pokémon is not really Nintendo’s — not wholly, at any rate.
Nintendo publishes the mainline Pokémon games exclusively on its consoles, but they are made by the independent developer that created them, Game Freak. With Game Freak and Creatures, the company that runs the Pokémon trading card game, Nintendo is the joint owner of The Pokémon Company, the rights holder that manages the multibillion-dollar Pokémon licensing business. Arguably the biggest Pokémon game ever, Pokémon Go, operates at a fully extended arms’ length from Nintendo, published and developed on mobile by third parties under license to The Pokémon Company.
This might seem unthinkable for Nintendo, which is well-known for its control-freakery and high opinion of its internal talent and processes. But the truth is that Pokémon’s explosive popularity in the late 1990s and 2000s was not the first or only instance of Nintendo’s success being driven by a game it didn’t fully control.
Nintendo consoles are usually thought of as existing hand-in-hand with Nintendo games, often Mario games; the one sells the other. But in 1989, the company found itself with a revolutionary piece of hardware — the Game Boy — that its game designers had yet to find the perfect application for. Tetris was the answer, and the intrigue-filled story of Nintendo’s desperate lunge to secure the rights to make the Game Boy version of that game is the stuff of game industry legend.
Tetris helped Nintendo create a whole new market around portable game consoles that the company has dominated ever since. Handhelds, which could be marketed more easily at kids and casual gamers, propped Nintendo up during dark times for its home console business. Eventually, with the hybrid Switch, the handheld market would furnish Nintendo with the third way it needed to circumvent competitors like Microsoft and Sony and enter a new era of sales dominance.
None of that would have happened without Tetris, but it probably wouldn’t have happened without Pokémon, either. Nintendo made brilliant handheld crystallizations of its own series like Mario and Zelda for Game Boy, but for some reason an original concept for a perfect portable game still eluded Shigeru Miyamoto and its other star designers.
Instead, that inspiration fell upon former game journalist Satoshi Tajiri, who had recently founded Game Freak, a development team named after a zine he founded in the early ’80s. Learning that two Game Boys could be connected with a Link cable, he mused about using this feature to trade rare items with other players, and combined the idea with memories of catching bugs as a boy.
Game Freak pitched the idea to Nintendo, which pounced on it. But it took years for Pocket Monsters, as it was originally known, to evolve into the sprawling role-playing adventure of 1996’s Pocket Monsters Red and Green, and another couple of years for those games to be released around the world and metastasize, alongside the trading card game and anime, into a global phenomenon. Pokémon powered the Game Boy format through the second half of its astonishing 14-year run (the console was discontinued in 2003) and helped set Nintendo up for life.
It might seem strange that Nintendo didn’t move to fully acquire Game Freak and Pokémon as soon as it became clear it would be a massive hit — which happened almost immediately in Japan, even if it took a few years for the so-called “Pokémania” craze to seize the rest of the world in its grip. That’s certainly what a company like Disney might have done. Instead, the tripartite partnership between Nintendo, Game Freak, and Creatures was established as early as 1998 to operate Pokémon Center stores in Japan, and by 2000 had developed into The Pokémon Company’s current role as worldwide licensor.
This arrangement isn’t as foreign to Nintendo as you might think. It has long kept extremely close, quasi-exclusive ties with a select handful of independent studios like HAL Laboratory (Kirby, Smash Bros.) and Intelligent Systems (Fire Emblem) without feeling the need to acquire them. But Pokémon’s runaway success was on a different scale. Surely it was tempted to try to grab 100% of this gigantic pie?
It could be that Tajiri and his friend and Creatures founder Tsunekazu Ishihara, designer and producer respectively of the original game, were never prepared to sell their creation. It’s also possible that Nintendo’s formidable late-20th-century president Hiroshi Yamauchi and his much more cuddly, but no less perspicacious, successor Satoru Iwata actively decided never to pursue this option. If that’s the case, perhaps it was a counterintuitively smart call.
It’s hard to imagine Nintendo, with its reputation for zealous and controlling oversight of its properties, relinquishing the reins enough to permit the kind of aggressive, all-consuming merchandising blitz that powered the Pokémon phenomenon in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Would the anime have happened if it was a 100% Nintendo property? Would Nintendo have wanted to get into the trading card business? (Maybe not, despite its early history as a playing card manufacturer.) Would Nintendo have been prepared to flood the market with as much licensed tat?
The Pokémon Company oversaw a rapacious land-grab of people’s time, money, and attention. It wasn’t precious about it, and it did so with limited oversight: Nintendo’s shareholders were at arm’s length, and Game Freak and Creatures were (and remain) privately held. Nintendo might have balked at getting its hands so dirty, but it was happy to cream off its share of this unprecedented bonanza — and happy to watch sales of the games, and the consoles to play them on, skyrocket. The arrangement also left Nintendo’s precious reputation with families relatively untarnished by the brief moral panic about Pokémon, which was focused more on the trading card game. The sometimes variable quality of Game Freak’s games, especially in recent years, must pain the perfectionists in Nintendo’s in-house studios, but reputationally, that’s a relatively small price to pay.
Perhaps this mildly distanced relationship with Pokémon isn’t so unlike Nintendo after all. The company is generally quite good at not fixing what isn’t broken, and unlike Western capital, it’s less bothered about rampant, acquisitive growth than it is about money in the bank. With the free agent of The Pokémon Company in charge, there’ll always be plenty of that to go around.