Pokémon Gold and Silver
Johto, a hundred new Pokémon, and a real clock that changed what came out of the grass after dark. The Game Boy Color sequels reached America in October 2000 on record pre-orders, and the real surprise waited past the credits: all of Kanto, and Red himself waiting deep inside Mt. Silver.
Game Freak started the sequels right after Red and Green shipped in Japan, and showed them at Nintendo's Space World in November 1997, where they were the most popular exhibit. A planned 1998 release slipped behind Pokémon Stadium and the first games' localization, Yellow took the slot, and programmer Shigeki Morimoto later said the three and a half years of development owed something to a team of only four programmers. Satoru Iwata, then president of HAL Laboratory and not yet a Nintendo employee, wrote new compression tools for the games' graphics.
Johto sits west of Kanto, three years after the first games, modeled on Japan's Kansai and Tōkai regions. The hundred new species took the Pokédex to 251, and the cartridge's internal clock tracked the time of day and the day of the week, so certain creatures and events only appeared at certain hours. Pokémon could hold items, breed at the Daycare and turn up shiny; Steel and Dark types arrived; and three legendary beasts roamed the map. You picked Chikorita, Cyndaquil or Totodile from Professor Elm, chased a rival who had stolen one of the others, and broke up a Team Rocket trying to find Giovanni. Then, after the Elite Four and Champion Lance, the game kept going: the whole of Kanto, its gyms, and deep inside Mt. Silver a silent trainer named Red, the hero of the first games, as the hardest fight of all.
Japan got the games on November 21, 1999, and bought 1,425,768 copies the first day. Nintendo had planned a first shipment of three million, then halved it after an earthquake in Taiwan that it said had damaged cartridge manufacturing. For America Nintendo drove five Chrysler PT Cruisers dressed as Lugia around the country, and spent an estimated $12 to $14 million on marketing. About 600,000 copies were pre-ordered in two months, four times Yellow's number, and after the October 15, 2000 launch the pair sold 1.4 million in a week, the fastest start any game had managed. GameSpot wrote that the clock "may sound like a gimmick" but "adds quite a bit of variety to the game."
By 2010 Gold and Silver had sold 23 million copies, the best-selling Game Boy Color games and the third-best-selling on the whole Game Boy family. Crystal added a third version in 2000 and 2001, the DS remakes HeartGold and SoulSilver followed in 2009 and 2010, and the originals returned on the 3DS Virtual Console in 2017.
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