Cool, I knew your name was familiar. Pokemon Brown is one of my favorite Pokemon Red/Blue hacks, just because of how immense and how much new content there was. It's the only hack of a Pokemon game where I actually attempted to play from start to finish. I heard you were disassembling Pokemon Gold to make a pretty advanced hack (sort of like the many Sonic hacks there are now) and played a short demo, and loved it. Nice to finally get to meet you. :)

The reason why I like Junichi's story so much, as it actually gives a possibile explanation to the following passage (with book source so it counts) from Wikipedia:

[quote:a7a7a93522]During the North American localization of Pokémon, it became apparent that simply altering the games' text from Japanese to English was impossible; the games had to be entirely reprogrammed from scratch due to the fragile state of the games' source code, a side effect of the unusually lengthy development.[30] Furthermore, as the games were being prepared for release, Western localizers warned that the "cute monsters" may not be accepted by American audiences, and instead recommended they be redesigned and "beefed-up". Then-president of Nintendo Hiroshi Yamauchi refused and instead viewed the games' possible reception in America as a challenge to face.[33] Despite these setbacks, the reprogrammed Red and Blue versions with their original creature designs were eventually released in North America over two and a half years after Red and Green debuted in Japan.[34] [/quote:a7a7a93522]

(note: in this case, reprogrammed possibly means disassembled - I don't think they had to go that far)

The sentence that mentioned the fragile state of the code, which I kinda have an idea what it means (I think it means that it was very prone to being broken if a small change was made). But I always thought that what they meant was that the game's code wasn't backed up properly, and Junichi's blog post explains exactly why. The game's code was backed up monthly due to the fact that it took forever to back it up on tape. So they only did monthly backups of possibly small amounts of code. When NoA wanted the game to be localized, the people doing the localization probably got the end of stick and was left with only half of what they needed to translate the game.

Keep in mind, that this stuff happens all the time. In fact, when Edios was porting FF7 to the PC, Square sent them an old copy of the source code - and they had to wait months before they got the up to date code. On top of all that, most of the files for that port were not re-prerendered, and were copied from the PSX version because it would take even longer than it did to re-master everything all over again. Of course, there are other things that probably messed with the schedule (anime, etc) - so the translation of the game probably wasn't the only factor. I'm sure drx has more source code/game port w/ original source code horror stories (if he'd only find the time to post them :P).

Another thing about Red/Blue was the amount of actual prototype content of the original Japanese game. Besides hack findings and concept art, there really isn't much that we know before the game was released in Japan. The closest that we'd ever be able to get to understanding of what some prototypes might have been like (but since the localized game was considered 'reprogrammed' - the localization team might have added new things in the code to benefit themselves) is to contact the people who did the guide book. I heard they were given limited permission to work with a debug version of the game. By limited permission, I mean, the build of the game was probably limited to only people who worked within the publisher's building - they were probably never allowed to take it home. Same goes for the original localization team. I think drx has more information about that - since he's kinda into the Pokemon stuff as I am.

edit: also just wondering, have you checked out every version of every Pokemon game from the first generation yet? I just thought about the possibilities they had when they came back to develop Pokemon Yellow - you know, if they changed how something was done that can't be seen in game but only in code. Was also wondering if the least complicated thing about R/B/G/Y was the sound engine, since I heard rumors of them going back and re-doing the sound engine for later releases. Don't know how true that is in what capacity, but I thought maybe you'd know.