Author's Note: This fanfiction will contain lots of original content such as original characters, background, story, world, and other stuff. Though no original Pokémon and NO AUTHOR INSERTS! I promise! This is my very first fanfiction, so if you have any professional criticism, please say it! If it's negative, I welcome it! Just make sure to add the reason why. Good luck!
-My regards, FireLightE.
Chapter 1: Project Pokemon
Several years in the future.
Nintendo was in a bad situation. They were backed into the corner of the gaming industry. With countless sales failures and multiple lawsuits, they were going down the road of bankruptcy. The most recent games being a commercial failure, and the many attempts on continuing franchises going stale, they were just barely keeping their head out of the water. But they were not safe. With the competition boasting new, better technology than them, they were constantly under threat. The company would have to make the choice. Keep on going, or sell the company. What once was a gaming goliath had withered into a husk of its former self, constantly being battered by the changing weather and struck by the strongest of lightning. Only a few loyal fans still bought its games periodically. All would be lost. There would be no more Nintendo. It would only lay in the minds of the old, and eventually, lost into the void.
They would need something big. They needed something huge, something that would lift them out of the raging ocean, and bring them to land for safety. But at the same time, they would have to risk it all. They would have to go big, or do nothing at all. They gathered the last of their employees. They created a plan. The plan would involve scientists, philosophers, and inventors. It had geologists, doctors, and astrophysicists. They recruited the few fans that they had. And they cherished them for volunteering for no compensation. They would need all the money that they could get. They dusted the corners of their closets. And stuck their hands into the depths of the couches. Working day and night, with enough coffee and energy drinks to fuel them, they flexed their long unused muscles. They set off to create something new, rather than old. Invent rather than innovate.
They went off of the groundwork off of a franchise that they have long forgotten. It was something that was a part of the company, part of its soul. It was a series that after years of neglect, still held its legacy together. It stubbornly refused to die out. With a fan base that had never played its games, or watched it's TV shows. But rather, they went of the nostalgia and memories of their parents. The archives of research than were never forgotten. It was still there. Still alive and kicking like a Lopunny. But it was not just the fan base that made it a perfect candidate, but its world. It had the power to immerse the player in not a game, but its whole world.
This would be their final chance, their final chance to make an impact in the world. But what is this game, their phoenix, their Final Fantasy? Simply bringing out a new game of an old series would not suffice. They would create a way to enter a world. A virtual world, but still a world that looked like one, felt like one. Something that many have tried but failed. Only to exist in pop culture such as The Matrix, SAO, or Accel World, But having no relationships to those.
But in doing so they would set off something that they would never have intended. Something that they would tread upon, that would open the doors of not something they ever knew, but something that they were familiar with, and yet, at the same time being completely unknown to them. But they would never know it until it came up right into their faces.
The plan would be called Project Pokémon.