UNIX story in Junichi Masuda manga

[nafnlj]

I found a good OS manga reference. The information comes from a translation of an interview with Juinichi Masuda on the development of the original Pokémon Red and Green. Masuda was in charge of the music for Red and Green (as well as subsequent Pokémon games)... but he unexpectedly had to undertake greater responsibilities. First, see links to the interview:

https://lavacutcontent.com/masuda-game-freak-history/
https://web.archive.org/web/20230630230 ... k-history/
(Including the archived version since the main site does not like to load with any kind of script blocking.)

Pokémon originally had three programmers. They all quit in 1995. That obviously threw the project into doubt. Masuda, who was not a programmer by trade at the time, decided to take charge and try to save Pokémon, which was now 5-6 years in development. Our UNIX reference comes from a Japan-only Masuda manga about the development of Pokémon. The author of the article had a few relevant pages of the manga translated into English to go with the Masuda interview. See links to the scans:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230603195 ... anga-3.png

Masuda takes over development. The workstation crashes. Game Freak is concerned because: "This isn't an ordinary desktop, it uses a special system called UNIX." Masuda apparently did not know anything about the OS, but he stayed up all night learning how it worked so he could diagnose the problem.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230603195 ... anga-4.png

I have read a good number of interviews about the development of the first and second generation Pokémon games, but none of the interviews that I have come across go into detail about the specific OS that was being used in development.

[Yukinu]

Very interesting! I wonder which type of unix machine they were using. The IPSJ computer museum has a page on Unix machines in japan in the 1980s to early 2000s (https://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/unix/history.html).

[nafnlj]

Very interesting! I wonder which type of unix machine they were using. The IPSJ computer museum has a page on Unix machines in japan in the 1980s to early 2000s (https://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/unix/history.html).

Your resource inspired me to find the answer (https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/pokemo ... ter-crash/):

"The team was using Sun Sparcstation 1 computers, running Unix, to make the game, and the machines were prone to crashing."

[Yukinu]

Very interesting! I wonder which type of unix machine they were using. The IPSJ computer museum has a page on Unix machines in japan in the 1980s to early 2000s (https://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/unix/history.html).

Your resource inspired me to find the answer (https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/pokemo ... ter-crash/):

"The team was using Sun Sparcstation 1 computers, running Unix, to make the game, and the machines were prone to crashing."

Turns out the Wikipedia page for SPARCStation 1 has a small note about this as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstat ... table_uses

Four or five SPARCstation 1 units were used by Game Freak to develop Pokémon Red and Green.[5]