Does Pokemon have "indie roots"?

[Italianbaptist]

Hopefully the introductory post will clear up some confusion about the question I'm asking...

Is Pokemon an indie game series? Absolutely not. Nintendo's involvement and the marketing from the earliest of days make that pretty clear.

Is Game Freak an indie company? It's hard to argue that they are, again due to Nintendo's involvement as well as the fact that "indie" wasn't really a thing back then.

But I have noticed a lot more people talking about Game Freak's development strategy resembling that of a smaller "indie-esque" company, specifically in the making of the main series games of Generations 1 and 8. Regardless of one's thoughts on Sword/Shield's development cycle, both the most recent and the earliest games in the main series exhibit a sort of "rough around the edges" feel. For Sword/Shield, some of that feel could be attributed to the fact that the team for those games were relatively small while the other half of the company was working on Little Town Hero.

I probably wouldn't have given it too much thought except I've been seeing more the history of Game Freak as a company. Originally they were a video game fanzine that eventually expanded into game development. The concept of "indie studios" didn't really exist at the time, but a company with such humble beginnings evokes that idea to me at least.

I'm not entirely sure if this has any implications for the future even, but with the 25th anniversary coming up it was fun to look at this stuff. I hope it is for you too. Also "if I ran the Pokemon Company", I'd probably outsource a game or two to the indie company who made that Bug Fables game

 

[Bolt the Cat]

I can't remember where, but I did see somewhere that Game Freak is resistant to expanding their staff because they want to operate like a small indie studio. So I think there's definitely some merit to this idea considering they're nowhere near where they need to be for AAA development and don't seem to have any interest in getting there.

 

[Gamzee Makara]

Pokémon is a ripoff of Dragon Quest V, so no, it doesn't.

It's a corporate ripoff. By a company on the Japanese equivalent of the pink stocks.

No indie dev studio is on the pink stocks, which are the lowest stocks of all.

They're corporate, through and through.

And f**k the Bug Fables/Bugsnax devs. Stereotypically capitalistic cry from a suddenly and way too convienently there to be a coincedence game dev of "we did it better" while ripping off a ripoff to rip off and profit off of the people conned into being NatDexers by a SEGA/Sonic Fandom psyop, Arlo-fueled Paper Mario fanwhiners and Genwunners =/= good game.

If anything, Game Freak and the BugSnax devs owe SquareEnix money for patent infringement regarding Dragon Quest V.

 

[TwilightBlade]

Hmm I guess so? I remember reading stuff about how the generation 1 games were created by a small number of programmers and Satoshi Tajiri was more involved back then. Even now the staff seems to be small so I guess you could say that the franchise has indie roots. :]

 

[Tsukuyomi56]

Game Freak does have a bit of indie roots starting off as a self-published video game magazine before going into video game development. They seem reluctant to grow pass that whether it be expanding their team or getting a bit outside help.

 

[Leonhart]

I hadn't thought about it like that before, but I suppose there's some truth to the notion that Game Freak was an "indie" game company at one point. It's amusing to see just how major the franchise became despite its humble beginnings.