Will Pokemon Entertain Us for Hundreds of Years? That's What Head of The Pokemon Company Wants
In an interview with the editor of The Guardian, the chief operating officer of The Pokemon Company, Takato Utsunomiya, stated that the company's goal is to „keep Pokemon alive for hundreds of years.” In this regard, he also touched on several issues related to the brand's future.
History of Pokemon began with the legendary Satoshi Tajiri, who, as a child, was fascinated by insects and various creatures. He allegedly even collected them, gave them names and arranged duels between them. In adulthood, he returned to the subject and, inspired by this peculiar hobby, created a game about collecting popular creatures...
The rest is history, but I will add that to date, more than 460 million copies of games in the series have been sold, and the mobile Pokemon Go still has about 80 million active users worldwide. I'm not even mentioning the anime, movies, cards and other gadgets. This incredibly profitable brand (along with Satoshi Tajiri's studio Game Freak ) has been owned for years by a larger company - The Pokemon Company, whose chief operating officer is Takato Utsunomiya.
"I spend every day thinking about Pokemon."
Asked by the editor of The Guardian about his job, Utsunomiya replied with a laugh that he "spends every day thinking about Pokemon." He added that the goal of his work and the company's operations is to ensure the brand lives on for hundreds of years. He concluded by saying that he wants to make sure Pokemon will survive longer than he has. This is an attitude that should make the fans optimistic. On the other hand, how to achieve such goals?
One of the key ways to maintain continued audience interest and encourage the next generation to get acquainted with the series is, at least according to Utsunomiya, to create more and more new creatures (there are currently more than 1,000 of them). At the same time, he assures that GameFreak, the team responsible for this task, is constantly being joined by people who played Pokemon as children, so they know exactly how to do it.
"Inventing new Pokemon is an area where Game Freak really excels. People who grew up playing Pokemon, are now joining Game Freak, becoming part of teams, creating new Pokemon, and are constantly coming up with new ideas."
Takato Utsunomiya stressed that it is important to him that Pokemon - as, in his opinion, an extremely universal product - reaches not only audiences of all ages and genders, but also of different origins and from every corner of the world. In the interview, he pointed out that as a company they need to learn the value of different cultures.
"Pokemon are most popular in the Americas, Europe and Japan - and if you combine these populations, that's about one billion people. There are still more than seven billion people outside these territories. We really want the rest of the world to become passionate about Pokemon. So we need to learn how to somehow incorporate values and cultural elements from around the globe into the series."
"The games are really important for the brand"
A very important fact can also be taken from the aforementioned conversation - Takato Utsunomiya believes that games are the best way to "experience" Pokemon. He also assures that they will always be the most important for the company.
Equally interesting are the thoughts of the COO of The Pokemon Company related to the realism of the environment in Pokemon, which began to be created as early as in Legend of Arceus and Pokemon Scarlet/Violet. In his opinion, the descriptions from the Pokedex should coincide with what we see in the game, and the amount of detail we can observe should increase in subsequent games.
This means that we may someday be able to admire the truly complex behavior of creatures in their natural environment. Utsunomiya believes that there is still a lot of work to be done on this topic. It also represents a return to the roots, to the childhood fascination with the life and functioning of the small, intriguing creatures that Pokemon creator Satoshi Tajiri displayed from an early age.
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Author: Michal Harat
He graduated in Polish philology with a specialization in journalism at the University of Gdańsk. He fell in love with games at the age of 4, when his older cousin turned on his dusty Pegasus. He completed his first title, Wolfenstein 3D, in the basement of his friend from kindergarten (his father kept an outdated PC there). Today, he plays almost exclusively on consoles, mainly on Switch and PlayStation, but he also has a lot of retro equipment on which he makes up for what he missed as a child. He says about every soulsborne production that "it's a good game, maybe the best." In his free time, he reads books that no one is interested in and goes to the gym. He is a fan of the Berserk manga and films from the A24 production company.
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