According to a recent investigation by Pokémon fans, the original Pokémon Red and Blue would have had different worlds and available Pokémon for each player based on an ID number - with nearly 65 thousand different versions planned. The first two Pokémon games launched on the Nintendo Game Boy in 1996 in Japan, and 1998 for the rest of the world, and instantly became a global sensation thanks to their 150 elementally-empowered creatures that players could collect, train, and trade. The overwhelming success of Pokémon Red and Blue would spawn countless follow-up games, manga, movies, and a long-running anime series that continues to this day.
The original Pokémon Red and Blue took on many different forms and iterations over the years, with Pokémon Blue originally sold as Pocket Monsters: Green in Japan before being renamed for its overseas release. A few years after the original release, Pokémon Yellow added a Pikachu that followed the player throughout their journey across the Kanto region and made a few other changes to emulate the Pokémon anime series. In 2004, Nintendo and Game Freak re-released Pokémon Red and Blue for the Game Boy Advance as Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, which also added a new area for players to explore once they finished the main quest.
As it turns out, there were originally going to be 65,535 unique versions of Pokémon Red and Blue when they first launched in the late 90s, as reported by the gaming trivia YouTube channel DidYouKnowGaming?. The channel launched a large investigation into the history of the games, discovering that the plan was for each specific copy of Pokémon Red and Blue to feature a personalized ID number (which actually made it into the finished Pokémon Red and Blue) that would lead to each player experiencing different map layouts and Pokémon battles, with said number also being imprinted on the Pokémon within each game. Whenever a player traded with someone else, the number assigned to their Pokémon would remain. The full video report and investigation can be seen below.
Poring over interviews and books, DidYouKnowGaming discovered original Pokémon Red and Blue programmer Takenori Oota wanted each copy of the game to generate a number when it first booted up. An old issue of Japanese gaming magazine Famimaga 64 revealed Game Freak founder Satoshi Tajiri wanted each player’s experience to be different, which led to discussions between him and Nintendo head Shigeru Miyamoto. Tajiri later explained in a book that each Pokémon cartridge would be a world in itself, with roughly 65,000 randomly-generated numbers (the exact amount was later discovered to be 65,535) assigned to each copy of the game. Miyamoto deemed the concept too confusing for fans, and instead suggested splitting the versions of Pokémon by color instead. The video investigation delves even deeper, and is a must-watch for Pokémon fans.
While the concept of each copy of Pokémon Red and Blue being assigned a different number that determined the layout and variety of Pokémon of each version of the game was ultimately never implemented, it is interesting to discover the origins behind the mysterious and seemingly meaningless ID number that was assigned to players at the beginning of each playthrough of Pokémon Red and Blue. This idea probably won’t be implemented into the upcoming Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, but perhaps it could happen in the future.
Source: DidYouKnowGaming?/YouTube