“Pocket Card Jockey” is a mix of horse racing and solitaire, where the better you play solitaire, the better your horse performs, but not without correctly paying attention to a handful of factors like the motivation, mood, and positioning of your horse that could be a boon for your performance and sponsor or spell out your doom on the track. 

 

The premise is fittingly just as ridiculous. You play as a lazy jockey who tried to ride a racing horse and got kicked off so hard that they died. But fret not! They were revived by an angel (that looks suspiciously like the jockey trainer) who forced them to make a deal in return for their return to life: since they’ve been playing solitaire on easy mode on their smartphone, they are blessed with the ability to play solitaire while horse racing, and the better they play solitaire, the better they race.

 

The craziest thing about this game is not how good the music is, nor how seamless the concept flows with each part of the gameplay, nor the bonkers narrative, but that it was made by Game Freak, the developers of Pokémon. Why would they make a game like this? And how could a company who develops games for the most profitable franchise in the world make a side project like this? 

 

For that, it’s important to see the whole picture.

 

In 1989, before Pokémon was even an idea, Game Freak was just a group of about nine likeminded individuals stuffed in an apartment making games for the PC and Nintendo Famicom (NES in the US) on the weekends. 

 

After a couple games, and after seeing the Game Boy’s link cable and its ability to connect two systems together to share and trade information, Satoshi Tajiri, co-founder of Game Freak, said: “Wouldn’t it be fun to trade monsters?” Thus, the initial idea of “Capsule Monsters” was born. But they lacked experience in making an RPG, so they took their time with the proposal process while working on other projects. 

 

Sooner or later the team caught the attention of Nintendo’s late president Gunpei Yokoi, and he asked them to make a game based around Yoshi, which was a great success and helped fund their eventual monster-trading idea, but it might’ve been too late when the game was released in 1995.

 

In an interview with Famitsu Weekly commemorating Game Freak’s 30th anniversary, Junichi Masuda, who’s been with Game Freak since the beginning, told Famitsu that: “We spent so long working on it that the world changed around us before we were finished. The Game Boy was already seven years old by the time Pokémon made it into stores. The hardware we were using was already past its prime, and there were rumors it was gonna get phased out.”

 

He also mentioned that they were still developing other games at the same time, so they weren’t even aware of the success of Pokémon until they made the next two games, Gold and Silver, in 1999, which sold so incredibly well that it began to dawn on the team that they had a serious franchise on their hands.

 

However, people believed that Pokémon would go out of fashion as a fad, and that put a lot of stress on the growing team of developers. So after developing Ruby and Sapphire for the Game Boy Advance in 2002, Ken Sugimori, another co-founder and art director at Game Freak, suggested making their first action platformer since “Pulseman” on the Sega Genesis in 1994: “Drill Dozer”. The 2005 Game Boy Advance game about an evil organization sending in an energetic pink-haired girl and her cute little drilling robot to steal riches, collect drill upgrading gears, and cause general mayhem across each level became a cult classic, and a fun refreshing palette cleanser for Game Freak.

 

Sevenish years later, “HarmoKnight”, a rhythm action game where you play as a knight saving the kingdom to the beat, released for the Nintendo 3DS. This was the first of a handful of games that came from something called the Gear Project; named after the main mechanic in “Drill Dozer”. It is a program that encourages creativity and innovation after taking on refreshing new projects, as anyone who has an idea for a game can propose it to top brass, and be considered for development by Department Development Team 1, while Department Development Team 2 continues to work on Pokémon. Some projects are found to be less fun than others, but the ones that have come out are seen as generally very favorable, and mostly obtain a cult classic status.

 

2013’s “Pocket Card Jockey” is the most successful of those games, and while these days the Gear Project is mostly used for proposals towards development taken in by outside developers, like the upcoming “Beast of Reincarnation,” everything was done in house for this 3DS gem, and it shows. The writing is irreverent, like they were having fun making such a silly game. The music is triumphant and energizing, as is expected from Go Ichinose, the main composer for the Pokémon games, and the gameplay is fine tuned and polished to a T.

 

In an interview with Masao Taya, director of the original “Pocket Card Jockey” and its 2023 Apple Arcade remake (and eventual 2024 Switch port), Polygon asks the long-time Pokémon programmer how his dream game came to be.

 

“I was already a horse racing fan and had been making horse racing simulators and similar programs.” Taya admitted to Polygon. “I had been proposing ideas that combined horse racing with card games within the company. However, even I don’t think those ideas were very good,”

 

“Then one day, my colleague—Pokémon series composer and fellow horse racing fan Go Ichinose—recommended that I try out a certain solitaire mobile game. He knew of my idea and suggested that I use solitaire instead of my card game.”

 

That solitaire app also had a leaderboard comparing speeds with people around the world, and Taya wished to recreate that rushed feeling in his game.

 

“To achieve that, I needed to both ‘think of efficient plays’ and ‘rapidly, accurately move cards without wasting a single second.’ I found my mind was in a state of comfortable excitement as I did this. So I imagined that a jockey riding a fast thoroughbred, who is constantly analyzing the situation and making decisions in order to win, is likely under a similar sort of stress and experiences the same kind of excitement when things go well.”

 

In an interview with IGN, Game Freak General Manager of Development Department 1 Masafumi Saito spoke on what the game, and the Gear Project, represents for Game Freak and their roots. 

 

“The departments in charge of developing original games aren’t limited by scale or platforms,” Saito notes. “Game Freak came about from our experiences of independently creating home video games, so we want to preserve the approach of personally wanting to try to create something new and unique … Even if resources are tight, we won’t stop working on original games [and] as a company we have to take on new challenges, and as creators we certainly want to make new fun things.”

 

Game Freak, returning to their roots in original titles that are built on smaller budgets and community sourced ideas, is an extremely rare case of having your cake and eating it too. While not every idea might be a hit, the process taken to make something new and original has value in and of itself, and should be remembered that even when you have a good thing, you shouldn’t forget where you came from. The birth of those raw feelings you had when making something new for the first time should drive you to create new things in the future.