The Making of The Amazing Pokémon Race

You are about to read the story of a Pokémon-themed reality game show that could take place in the real world. The entire story is a work of parody protected under the First Amendment and all events are entirely fictional. In several cases, the names of famous people or technology involved with Nintendo or The Pokémon Company may be used.

Off in a distant corner of the internet, a young man who chose to call himself "Maniac" typed furiously at his keyboard. He had been spent several weeks of his life writing an extremely complex story based on some ideas he had been held on to for the past twenty years. It was now a month after he published that story and many people online had been asking him to write more. So he sat at his desk and decided to explain to everyone what inspired him to write this lengthy story, and what the future held for it. He set up a camera in front of him and switched it on.

Maniac looked up at the camera and began, "Hi everybody, my name is Maniac, I'm the creator, writer and producer for The Amazing Pokémon Race, the story that you all have been reading for the past several weeks. Since wrapping up the series a few weeks ago, I've been getting requests nonstop from all over the web asking what my plans were for the future of this series. Some people have wondered if I was planning to write a brand new season of the show or if more episodes were going to be produced for this season. Some people have asked me what was my inspiration for the series, or who inspired the characters in it. Well, those are pretty loaded questions. Given that this little story has become one of my most popular on this website, I thought new episodes were in order, and so here we are, this episode will be a special look behind the scenes at The Making of The Amazing Pokémon Race."

"I'm sure many of you want to know my background with reality shows, and I'm afraid to tell you that in all honesty with very few exceptions I was never a fan of this genre. While I was in high school at the time reality shows started broadcasting on television, I never had any interest in watching any of them at first. However, in 2001 several producers tried to resurrect a game show where contestants had to travel across the United States in cars. During the events of the drive, the contestants would have to complete challenges set up by the show's producers in order for them to progress on to the next leg of their journey. While the show didn't do well in the ratings to the point where it never received a second season, I think it was actually the only reality show I ever enjoyed."

"At the same time I had also been watching the first two seasons of Pokémon: The Animated Series on the WB network. I hadn't been lucky enough to play the original games before I watched the animated series, but I was impressed by the show's premise and found myself watching it every afternoon. I thought the concept behind Pokémon was really compelling, but what made it truly great was the lore that was being built around the Pokémon franchise. It featured a fantastical world that had a lot of similarities to ours, and I thought it was a shame that no one had ever attempted to adapt it as a game show."

"That's a little bit on my background for Pokémon and reality TV but that wasn't the spark that inspired me to write this story. A few months ago, I was watching television with my girlfriend and her family. They have a tradition where they like to watch various reality shows together on a given night, and occasionally I have joined them. One show they watched in particular focused on several teams who would have to literally travel across the world solving challenges created by the show's producers. I thought it was a decent show, but I thought I could do a better job with it. Taking some inspiration from my background as a video game journalist, I thought that if Nintendo or The Pokémon Company would try something like that, and create a reality show where Pokémon superfans could do the same thing, only with challenges that had a Pokémon focus, they could essentially create the greatest show in the history of television."

"Once the idea came into my head, the episodes started writing themselves. I knew that Pokémon's developers over at Game Freak had intentionally modeled many of the regions found in the games after real-world locations. Knowing they were used for game inspiration, New York City and Paris immediately became locations I wanted to have as a venue for episodes. Once I decided on all the locations, I started creating challenges. Since I've personally visited locations like Nintendo World Headquarters and the Eiffel Tower, they became the perfect set pieces for the challenges I had in mind. Every reality show I've seen would usually feature two challenges per episode, an immunity challenge at the beginning which would keep a player or team safe from being kicked off of the show for that week, and an elimination challenge where the team who failed would be sent home. The inspiration for at least ninety percent of the game's challenges came from some special activities you could do in the games such as taking pictures or answering trivia, but one or two challenges were inspired by events I saw in an actual reality show. I'm sure many of you read the immunity challenge in Episode 3 and had flashbacks to playing Pokémon Snap on your Nintendo 64 consoles back in the early 2000s. That was intentional. The Pokémon Fashion Show in Episode 4 Part 1 was partially inspired by the Generation III contests, but its structure was based heavily on two specific reality shows my girlfriend has made me watch with her, one of which had John Waters appear as a guest judge. I wanted to showcase some of the newer titles in the game series, not just because they were fresh in my memory, but also because I figured that if I promoted some of the newest titles, the people at Nintendo would be less inclined to be offended by my stories if they ever came across them."

"So I had the inspiration for a story and a framework for how I wanted to tell that story, but I still needed to create characters. I watched a bunch of reality-shows and determined that it would make the best sense to have six teams of two trainers each. That meant I had to create twelve total contestants. Since I wasn't going to use any of Pokémon's characters (since they don't exist in the real-world) I knew that I had to create each trainer myself entirely from scratch. For diversity's sake and for the fact I felt it would make for the best inter-character interaction I decided to make each team co-ed. Then I decided to name each character after one of the Pokémon titles just to pay my respects to these great games. Since it was common for the game's iconic trainers to be named after their edition of the game, I figured it was fair to name each trainer after the first two games from each generation. It wasn't perfect, but it worked pretty well."

Maniac then shrugged and said, "Okay, even I have to admit my naming structure didn't work every time. For your enjoyment, here are some examples where it didn't work. I know in the American version of Pokémon, Trainer Blue was the name of the male rival, but that was only because the US never got the original versions of Pokémon that were released in Japan, which were called Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green. Japan would eventually get a Pokémon Blue, which had improved graphics, but it was released in Japan only. The US versions of the first generation games used Pokémon Blue's graphics assets, but had the game play data from Red and Green. Why tell you all that? Because that meant that in the original Japanese Gen I titles, the rival was named Trainer Green, not Trainer Blue. Early concept art did in fact feature the option for a female Pokémon trainer in the Gen I games, and she bared a strong resemblance to the female trainer option in the Gen I remakes, but she was not included in the original games. However, before she would appear in Pokémon FireRed and Pokémon LeafGreen, the character we now refer to as Green made several appearances in the original Japanese version of the Pokémon Adventures manga as Trainer Blue, signifying to me that she was originally meant to bear that color name. Even though she would later be referred to as Trainer Green when the manga was translated for an English speaking audience, I decided to make the female team member of Team One Trainer Blue as a way to honor Trainer Blue's creators. For Team Two, I unfortunately can't hide behind that excuse, because I know Silver was clearly the male rival in the Gen II games, and a female playable trainer wasn't added until Pokémon Crystal was released, making Crystal the true name of the female trainer of Gen II. So, why did I make Trainer Silver the female member of Team Two? Well, there were a lot of reasons I wanted to keep Gold as the male trainer of the team, particularly because I had seen a lot of males dress up as the Gen II trainer in the past few conventions I attended. For Team Three, I thought it would work better to make the male trainer Ruby as opposed to Sapphire because while I know it is more common for Ruby to be a female's name, I have heard of a few cases where men happened to be named Ruby, but no cases in the US of a man named Sapphire. To cement this issue down, I said that Trainer Ruby was named because his birthstone happened to be the ruby, so I guess he was born in July. Um…can we just call all of this a use of poetic license?"

"The hardest team to adapt to this naming system was Team Four, because I could not come up with an excuse to name a male trainer either Diamond or Pearl, and I wasn't going to reuse the birthstone excuse I used for Team Three. Because of that I decided to make Team Four the lone all-female team. The fact that they were eliminated first really had little to do with the fact they were an all-girl team and more to do with the fact I had no idea what to do with them for the rest of the series."

"Now that I had the teams written out, and names for each team member decided on, I needed to give each trainer a distinct personality. Actually, that wasn't as difficult as you might have thought. I watch a lot of videos about Pokémon history and lore online, and so I based the characters for Team One on two of my favorite YouTube personalities. Likewise, the members from Team Three were also based on YouTube personalities, but in this case they were based on two specific people who created Pokémon parody videos. Fortunately, I had actually met them in person a few times over the years at various conventions and events, so I had a bit more to go on than just a blank slate and a video screen. The members of Team Four were based on identical twin sisters I used to be friends with about a decade ago. They were really into Nintendo, and we used to play games on GameCube together, so I thought they were perfect for the members of Team Four."

"Team Six and Team Two were pretty original characters, because I felt that I needed to address two major components of Pokémon fandom that I felt the other teams were not addressing, and that was the wide age diversity of Pokémon fans, and the huge competitive aspects of real-world Pokémon tournaments. I chose to make Team Six the youngest team, since Pokémon X and Pokémon Y were the newest titles to be released. They're not based on anyone I know personally, but I used to be ten, so I based a lot of them on what I remembered from when I was that age. Another reason I chose to make them ten was to bring them in line with Ash Ketchum's enduring age on the Pokémon animated series. As for Team Two, I thought it would be interesting to pair together two very competitive trainers, and I thought they would be the most exciting to write because you would never know just how they would try to one up each other. While they didn't win the competition, I think that by the end of their story they ended up with the most personal growth out of all the teams."

"Finally we come down to Team Five, who were our winners this season. Like Team One and Team Three, Team Five was inspired by a YouTube video, in this case a video of a cute couple who dressed as Pokémon trainers and got engaged. However, unlike the other teams, that video just became a small aspect of their personalities. Eventually, aspects from my own personality and the personality of those closest to me started to go into their characters, and because of that I think they are probably the most fleshed out characters in the entire series, but I'll let you be the judge of that."

Maniac took a deep breath after finishing that lengthy explanation and continued, "So now that I had contestants for my show, I needed hosts. Nintendo likes to periodically release videos online called Nintendo Direct, where important people from the company showcase upcoming titles. I was a huge fan the segments Nintendo would feature from the Treehouse, where a man named Bill Trinen would preview some really awesome games for the 3DS and Wii U. Since he appeared to be so comfortable in front of the camera, I thought that if Nintendo were to make a show for an American audience, he would make for the perfect host. My original intention was simply to keep Bill as the lone host throughout all of the episodes, but that changed as I started to work on the fifth and final episode. Since only two teams were left by that point, and there was only going to be one challenge for them to complete with very little sightseeing going on, I thought the final episode was going to need a bit more substance before it was worthy of being published. At around this time, Nintendo had just held the Nintendo World Championship 2015, an incredible show which served as a great love letter to their long-time fans. During that show, Reggie Fils-Amie, the President of Nintendo of America, had a personal grudge match over a game of Super Smash Bros. I remembered Reggie hosted plenty of Nintendo events, and appeared in a lot of Nintendo videos, so I had a good understanding of his professional persona. I also thought that since the final challenge was going to be over a fighting game, it would be perfect to have two hosts comment on the main event, so I added Reggie as the host for the final episode. I'm pretty happy with this decision, since the banter between Reggie and Bill turned out better than I could have hoped for."

"However, there was one man that I knew I could not forget in this story, and I was going to wait until the very end before I was going to bring him out. Pokémon's creator is a man named Satoshi Tajeri, and I thought out of everyone who worked for Nintendo or The Pokémon Company, he would have to be the man who presented the final award, and declare the winning team the best like no one ever was."

"I have no idea if anyone I've based these characters on has read this story, so I really can't comment on how they feel about being in it. I want everyone to know that if I did use you in this story, it was only because I'm a true fan of your work, and wish you would consider your appearance here the sincerest form of flattery."

"Now that we've talked about all the characters, let's talk a little about the game's setting. I always wanted the series to take place in the real-world, not the Pokémon world. While I've always been a huge fan of Pokémon's lore, and I was an enormous devotee to the first few seasons of the animated series, I felt like if I wanted to tell a story about a reality show, it had to be real, and that meant I was limited by reality. While some people would consider that too much of a constriction, I actually appreciated it. It made setting up the framework of each episode that much easier, and I didn't have to worry about violating any laws of Pokémon's lore, I just had to present the challenges I envisioned in as believable a way as I possibly could. That's why I clearly wrote the Pokémon during the Pokémon Snap challenge were full sized animatronics, I described all the models cosplaying as recognizable characters as supermodels in costume instead of the characters they were portraying, and got into technical specifics about how things like the Safari Zone worked in the story. In the end I really don't think any of my ideas had to be cut out or trimmed down due to reality's limitations. I've seen a lot of travelogues which filmed in the South Pacific, and I was struck by how beautiful the islands were from the ocean, so I decided to dedicate Episode 3 to that location and had challenges held in sea and on land. In fact, Episode 4, the longest and most complicated episode of the entire series, had to be greatly expanded to keep my plans for the episode grounded. I've actually been to the real Eiffel Tower and walked up to the very top of it. After I played Pokémon X this summer, I knew I wanted to do something with Prism Tower, the location of the Lumiose City Gym, so I envisioned a challenge where the trainers would have to scale the Eiffel Tower. It worked out better than I could have hoped."

"Since we're talking about real-world inspiration already, let's talk a little bit about the inspiration behind the series finale episode. I thought that the best way to present a finale for the show was to take a cue from The Wizard and give the players something none of them had ever played before. That would have guaranteed an even playing field between the last two teams, and given the spectators a great reason to show up to cheer on the players, and I knew exactly what game I wanted them to play. Earlier in the year, Nintendo had announced they were planning to release Pokkén, a fighting game featuring Pokémon characters, into Japanese arcades but very little information other than some brief preview videos had been released about the game at the time. Due to its heavy anticipation, I thought that having a Pokkén tournament would be perfect for a finale. In fact, right now I'm sure many of you are probably drawing parallels to this year's Nintendo World Championships where unreleased titles were played in the competition, and you'd be right. The problem was time it seemed was not on my side. While nothing about the game was shown at this year's E3, information about the game started to be released as I was writing new episodes of the series. In fact, by the time I published the last episode, Pokkén had gotten an official release in Japanese arcades, something that I was not expecting to happen as soon as it did. After I heard about the arcade launch and the musings by a major chain to bring the game to the West, I realized I needed to publish episode five as soon as I could. Turns out, I was right to do that because not long after the final episode was published, Nintendo announced Pokkén is going to be ported internationally for the Wii U platform in 2016. I have no idea what made me decide to give the final winners a Pokémon Snap printer, but I challenge anyone to tell me if they can think of a promotion that happened fifteen years ago that people remember as well as they remember Nintendo's partnership with Blockbuster Video. Every Pokémon fan, including me, wants one of those machines so I figured it would make for a great surprise to the winning team."

"Next, you're probably wondering if there was anything that I had to cut from the series. Well, most of my plans ended up in the story, and very little was omitted with one or two minor exceptions. Originally, when I was outlining the early portion of the first few episodes, I intended to spend several episodes with the trainers traveling around Japan. In fact, the Pokémon Center that served as the finish line for the second episode's elimination challenge was originally only going to be the first of many Pokémon Centers that the teams would have had to travel through. That's right, I was going to have the teams travel all across the Japanese countryside to try to see who would be the first to visit every single Pokémon Center in the country. That eventually became too monumental a task to fully plan out, and so I scaled the challenge back so the teams would only have to reach one specific Pokémon Center from a common start point. If anyone is really upset about the loss of what could have been an incredible Japan-focused episode, just be aware that if I had gone that route, it would have prevented me from bringing the teams out of Japan for the whole season. I decided instead to cut down on the scope of the first challenge and make the show an international affair. I also wanted to have a rollerblading race through a major city as an immunity challenge, but that turned out to be too complex to write. It may end up being used in a later story."

"I also was not going to originally eliminate any of the teams from the show. I figured since I worked really hard fleshing out each character's back-story and possibilities for the dynamic they would have with each other were so good I wanted to keep them all around throughout the whole contest. The original plan was that teams would still be eliminated each episode, but they wouldn't go home, and they would still participate in all of the later challenges even though they were no longer in contention for the grand prize. I thought that towards the end of the show, I could have some kind of wild card event where a team would return to contention depending on their performance throughout the series. I quickly realized that if I kept every trainer around for every single episode, it would have two major problems. The first was that I would have to keep track of more characters through each event, making for longer stories which I could not guarantee would release on time. The second issue had more to do with pacing. I thought I was straining my readers' attention spans to the max just having to repeat the events of more than one team having to complete the exact same task. While I was able to have the teams be able to tackle challenges in a diverse manner early on, I knew I wanted to have more linear challenges for the later events, and if I had kept all six of the teams active during those challenges it would have meant for a lot of boring repetition. Because of all of those issues I decided to just send eliminated teams home, but to keep readers from being too sad if a team they liked left early I gave everyone who left decent parting gifts."

Knowing he had reached the end of his back-story about the season, Maniac sat up straight in his chair to relate his plans for the future, "A lot of you have been asking what my plans are for the show's next season. Well…that's a very loaded question. The truth is I think it's far too soon for me to talk about this. I felt as though this series reached its logical conclusion at the end of the previous episode, but when you're dealing with reality shows you know there are always special episodes that can get added if the demand is high enough. While I would like to write a second season for this series, I think it would be more fitting to hold off on that for a while until Nintendo releases more Pokémon games. Until then, you guys can look forward to the final episode of this season, which will bring back all of the contestants in a special reunion. Stay tuned for that!"

"Finally, I'd like to personally thank all of you for reading, I don't think I would have been able to get as far as I have without your comments and encouragement. Please continue to post your thoughts about this story, and if you really want me to write a second series, just say so. Goodnight everyone, I'll see you next time."

After he finished, Maniac turned his camera off, shut the lights off in his room, and went to bed.

The End