Thought this was pretty funny, but Junichi Masuda's (programmer, music composer, now director for GameFreak) blog has a newly translated blog post (an old blog post, but whatever) from 5 years a go that mentions a little bit on development on Pokemon Red/Blue/Green that I thought was really interesting. His blog has more Red/Blue development posts, but they're scattered all over the place and there aren't a lot. This one stood out the most:

[quote:08d3d0882e]September 02, 2004
No. 13
category: Diary

Today I'll write about some geeky stories of old days.

When we started developing for Pokemon Red and Blue,
we at Game Freak took a plunge and bought a UNIX machine
called SUN SPARCstation 1.

Even now I think it was such a bold step because
it was very very expensive.

We also installed LAN boards from Allied Telesis
in our PC9801Xa and Epson computers in order to set up a LAN environment.
Four or five of us logged into the network from different
computers so that we could work together, but it was so slow.

When I was in technical school I studied CG and C language
using a medium-sized computer by DEC, and before I knew it
I was really into UNIX.

For someone like me, therefore, SUN was such an easy-to-use
machine...

But it sometimes crashed.  "What on earth is going on?"
Then there were times it never rebooted... "Oh my goodness!"

Whenever this happened I used to yell at the computer
"Start up!!! Please!"  It was almost like a prayer.

These days we used streamer tapes that were as large
as VHS cassettes for backups.
But they took so long that we didn't back up as
often as we should have.
So when computers crashed there was a possibility that
more than a month's worth of all of our contributions
might go down the drain.
We tried every possible means to rescue the computers.

We read manuals in English and impossibly thick books on computers.
We also asked for help on Nifty Serve's bulletin board.

When a machine didn't start up for a continuos period
(like reboots during startup),
I was so completely preoccupied with the problem
that I even had a dream of my machine starting up!

Looking back it was a very good learning experience.

From Masuda, a vi mania.
[/quote:08d3d0882e]

There are more biographical posts about his life, including the first thing he used as the basis for learning how to program - a Tetris clone.

We could probably use this topic as a ground base for discussing development for these older classics, since prototype information is very small in comparison to all the other games (except for translation crap).