Earlier this week, news broke that everyone at Nintendo is a silly billy. I’m sorry, I mean ‘news broke that Nintendo cancelled a new Pokemon Pinball’. Really though, aren’t they the same thing?
Pokemon Pinball was one of the first Pokemon spin-offs ever, launching between April and October 1999 in different territories around the world. It didn’t quite get a foothold on popular culture the way Pokemon Snap, Pokemon Stadium, or the unstoppable might of Pokemon Go did, but it was one of the first games to showcase Pokemon as a phenomenon. These days, we have Pokemon games about brushing your teeth, and we even have one on the way where you win by sleeping. For games like this to exist, a game has to come along and prove that these characters can be lifted out of their RPG framework. In many ways, Pokemon Pinball was that game.
Related: The Best Way To Play Pokemon Is To Be A CheapskateIt wasn’t just a pinball game with the Pokemon iconography attached to it, however. Pokemon Puzzle League, which came out a year later, was just Panel de Pon with Pokemon pictures at the side. Before each round, you chose a trainer and Pokemon from a decent roster, but this had zero impact on gameplay. Pinball, however, embraced its Pokemon roots.
The core element of the game, as you might have guessed, was pinball. Surprisingly, this was also the weakest department for Pokemon Pinball. The physics were wonky, with the ball looping up, zipping off, or thudding against barriers with no rhyme or reason. It also included a rumble feature, activated by putting an extra battery inside a chamber at the top of the enlarged cartridge, although even the biggest Pokemon Pinball fan would tell you this was mostly pointless.
Where Pokemon Pinball really excelled was in the catching mechanics. While you need to battle to progress in regular Pokemon, catching has always been at the core of the series. It’s not ‘gotta battle ‘em all’, is it? Many spin-off games have struggled to include this. Pokemon Go is built around it, and Snap lets you capture Pokemon in your camera lens rather than physically, but most Pokemon side games leave catching behind. Pokemon Pinball would be forgiven for doing the same. After all, how do you catch something in a pinball machine? Life, uh, found a way.
Each pinball board included a selection of tiles, and running over each one with the ball would flip them, uncover them, or somehow reveal them. If they’re all showing at the end of the round, congratulations – you just caught yourself a Pokemon. Or at least, you have the chance to. Now, you have a limited amount of time to hit the Pokemon with the pinball (or Poke Ball, as it is here) four times in order to catch it. There’s also a completely different game mode for evolving Pokemon, which requires filling certain conditions on the table then sinking the ball into a hole.
You can play on both the Red table or the Blue table, and hit a variety of different locations that mimic traveling around in each game. Through this, you can catch all 151 Pokemon that existed at the time. Pinball didn’t just phone it in by giving you Pikachu, Charizard, and Mewtwo – we get the full Pokemon experience.
In fairness, Nintendo did understand the game’s greatness. Four years later in 2003, we did get a sequel – Pokemon Pinball: Ruby & Sapphire. This was essentially more of the same, with a few extra gimmicks that didn’t really work, plus the introduction of eggs, which did. It’s a shame that Gen 2 – Pokemon’s best Gen ever despite its Unite absence – gets skipped over, and the Pinball sequel probably should have worked on improving the actual pinball, but it’s a solid step from the original. 18 years later and oh so many Pokemon spin-offs later, we haven’t seen another Pokemon Pinball – but we should have.
A recent Nintendo leak revealed a DS Pokemon Pinball was planned for 2006, then scrapped. That’s still 15 years ago, but you figure if that one gets made, there’s a greater chance the series manages to keep rolling onwards with the new generations. As it stands, the series is neither popular enough to warrant a reboot nor advanced enough for the original version to be very successful, even if Switch Online included it as a free port when (or if, more accurately) it moves into the Game Boy era.
Pokemon Pinball was a great Pokemon spin-off, but we’ll never see its likes again. Nintendo has done okay since 2006, so I suppose it knows what it’s doing, but cancelling Pinball still feels like a big mistake.
Next: Pokemon Unite Paves The Way For A Pokemon Sports Title
