Shigeru Miyamoto Congratulates Pokemon on Its Twentieth Anniversary

The Pokemon Company has published a new video, featuring legendary game creator Shigeru Miyamoto congratulating Pokemon for its 20th anniversary. In the video, Miyamoto, the creator of Nintendo's Mario and Zelda franchises, spoke about his own contributions to the Pokemon franchise and the success the games have had over the last twenty years.

"My main contribution was working with [Satoshi Tajiri, creator of Pokemon] and his team on creating a new way to play using a Nintendo Game Link Cable to connect two Game Boy systems," Miyamoto said. "Time flew by, and now there are Pokémon games in so many colours! Twenty years. I almost can't believe it."

Miyamoto acted as a mentor to Tajiri during the creation of the original Pokemon games and suggested creating pairs of games, each with different sets of Pokemon, for each generation to encourage trading. Tajiri immortalized Miyamoto in the games by naming the protagonist's main rival in Red/Blue "Shigeru" in his honor. In the English translations of the Pokemon games, Shigeru became Gary Oak, Ash's main rival and a recurring antagonist in the anime series.