Game Freak, ce sont les créateurs de Pokémon. Mais il y a un avant et un après cette histoire. Avant, Game Freak s'était des jeux comme Pulseman, Mario & Wario ou encore le jeu de puzzle Yoshi.
Après une dizaine d'années de succès de Pokémon de nouvelle idées vinrent à Game Freak : Drill Dozer (GBA) et HarmoKnight (3DS) tout deux édités par Nintendo, mais également Pocket Card Jockey, Tempo the Badass Elephant (édité par Sega), Giga Wrecker et le prochain "Town" sur Nintendo Switch.
Aujourd'hui Game Freak revient sur ses équipes internes dans une interview accordée à Video Game Chronicles :
There are two different production teams here, simply named Production Team 1 and Production Team 2. Team 1 is fully dedicated to Gear Project, while Team 2 is for the Pokémon operation. What that means is that Game Freak as a company is prioritizing Gear Project, which is production team number one, more than Pokémon in general. We are always trying to create something that is equally exciting, or more exciting than Pokémon.
There is a lot of back-and-forth between Team 1 and Team 2. One of the interesting things is that Team 2, which is dedicated to Pokémon, only knows about specific platforms. So with Team 2, engineers can learn about other platforms that they might not have touched before. By mixing up the teams we are able to create this interesting synergy.
2019 will be very exciting, especially following the Pikachu Let’s Go titles which allowed us to start looking seriously at Nintendo Switch as a platform. That was a very important milestone for us before moving on to the next step. In terms of the number of titles we are releasing this year, it’s happened coincidentally. It’s not like we’re trying to put everything together in 2019 – it just happened.
R&D is a newly founded division which is creating the basic library, which used to be created every single time we made a project. That helps the efficiency of our production for sure. Also, we are looking at what’s going on in the future, from a technical perspective, and that’s something else that we’ve never had before. I think that R&D division will certainly contribute to the future of Game Freak.