A new Pokemon Snap game is finally on its way!
The inventively titled…
“New Pokemon Snap”, has been a Holy Grail of sorts for Pokemon fans over the past two
decades.
Now, 21 years after the release of the original Pokemon Snap, a sequel has been announced,
and everyone is understandably thrilled.
So why did it take so long?
Longtime Pokemon overseer Junichi Masuda has been asked about a new Pokemon Snap many times
over the years by eager fans.
Last year, when speaking to Metro, he said: “All I can say is that I don’t think we
can just make the same thing again.
So we’d have to come up with a very unique twist on this if we do make another one.”
Indeed, looking at the history of the game, it seems as if nobody at the Pokemon Company
has really felt confident about making a follow-up to Snap.
After all, the original Pokemon Snap wasn’t made by Game Freak, and it was in development
long before Pokemon was even released.
In 1994, a team at HAL Laboratory were working on a game for the Nintendo 64 Disc Drive called
Jack and the Beanstalk.
This work-in-progress photography game was set in a fantasy world, retelling the classic
Cornish fairy tale about a boy with magic beans that would use the Disc Drive’s clock
to grow in real time.
Surprise surprise, a game about slowly watching plants grow wasn’t actually a lot of fun
to play.
The project needed to be dramatically reworked to give it a better focus, and as Pokemon
began to blossom in popularity, the team at HAL found the perfect new direction for the
game.
Said Satoru Iwata, who was working at HAL at the time:
“Originally, Pokémon Snap for the Nintendo 64 system wasn't a Pokémon game, but rather
a normal game in which you took photos, but the motivation for playing the game wasn't
clear.
We wondered what players would enjoy taking pictures of, and later on we made a somewhat
forced switch to taking pictures of Pokémon.”
Not everyone was on board with this change, expressing a, quote, “negative reaction”
to having to switch gears and work on a Pokemon game.
A lot of the character design work for Jack and the Beanstalk had to be scrapped, although
much of the game’s content would be incorporated into the equally ill-fated Earthbound 64.
When Pokemon Snap released in 1999, it was a very short on-rails photography game without
a lot of content.
Nevertheless, it was PoKemon, so naturally, it won a dedicated audience.
Players loved the unique gameplay, the idea of catching Pokemon not in balls, but on film.
They loved figuring out how to make certain Pokemon appear, or trigger their evolutions,
in order to catch them on camera.
It might not be the deepest game, but it’s certainly a lot of fun.
Naturally, fans expected a sequel…but none materialised.
Why?
Because nobody really wanted to make another one.
The team at HAL Laboratory had moved on to other games, with a lot of them, as mentioned,
contributing to Earthbound 64 – before it was ultimately cancelled.
Meanwhile, the team at Game Freak were busy with their own Pokemon titles, having had
little involvement with Snap’s development at all.
As the years went by, the Pokemon Snap fans did their best to encourage the Pokemon Company
to make a follow-up game.
There have been many petitions, and even the occasional fan remake.
To hear Junichi Masuda tell it, though, the Pokemon Company simply didn’t know what
to do next.
In 2014, he said in an interview: “As a player I definitely want to play a
cool new version of Pokemon Snap but at the same time I also think if it was just a remake
with better graphics I don't think it would be as interesting as a lot of people are imagining.”
While we may be reading too much into this, it almost sounds as if Junichi doesn’t think
the core Pokemon Snap gameplay is even all that interesting.
Certainly not deep enough to sustain a remake.
Junichi went on to say: “If someone was to end up developing it
they'd have to come up with some cool ideas to really make it a good game for the current
generation…
If it was just a direct port that would be kind of neat as well, but having new elements
is definitely important.”
So why has it taken so long to make a new Pokemon Snap?
Apparently, someone at the Pokemon Company has finally found the desire to make a new
one.
The impetus to innovate; to try to expand the simple on-rails shooter concept to create
a more satisfying experience.
This is great news, because while the Pokemon creators might think that Pokemon Snap is
a bit basic, its many many players know that sometimes, simplicity in game design can create
something wonderful.
Let’s leave that as the moral for this story: don’t be afraid to keep things simple.
If New Pokemon Snap ends up being a denser version of the original game, that’s great!
It’s all anyone’s ever been asking for anyway!