Celebrate Pokemon’s 20th With Legendaries And A Look Back

The Pokemon celebrations continue with a series of legendary Pokemon distributions, and interviews with the Game Freak greats.

February at last! If you’re a Pokemon fan, this is THE month to get excited–February 27th marks Pokemon’s actual 20th anniversary, and though they’re seemingly celebrating all year, we can expect even bigger things in the month and around the day itself.

If you own Pokemon X, Y, OmegaRuby, or Alpha Sapphire you can get into the spirit immediately by visiting your local GameStop to pick up a game code for Mew, with similar moves and stats to the one that was originally distributed only in Japan for the first generation of games. More legendary Pokemon will be on their way, and the Mew promotion only lasts until February 24th, so get it while you can. By the end of the year, all of the special release legendary Pokemon will have been made available.

There’s more. To kick off the month, Pokemon has released two short YouTube videos–one with Junichi Masuda (composer, director, and/or producer for every main series title to date) and one with Tsunekazu Ishihara (President and CEO of The Pokemon Company). The videos feature their respective hosts talking about their history with making Pokemon games and a bit of insight into the process and struggles they overcame to make Pokemon what it is today.

Matsuda jokes about the unreliability of old computers, and the excitement of working on new game:

Ishihara reveals a bit of history behind the Pokemon TCG, and his joy at seeing its existence 20 years later:

It’s delightful to watch these two great creators speak lovingly about their work. There’s surely even more surprises (big and small) to look forward to in the coming month from Pokemon!