>>25042964>>25043006These guys are *almost* correct. Red and Green were the first pair released and were buggy as hell, beyond even what we got, as well as having the incredibly shitty sprites. When the hype took off, they released a third version, Blue. Blue had improved coding and sprites so it ran better (if not perfectly) and looked better. When it came time to localize things to the US, they took the coding and sprite base of Blue and simply changed it around to have the respective pokemon available that Red and Green had. So this wasn't a case of Blue being released as-is and an updated Red to pair with it. It was literally Red and Green plugged into the improved coding of the original third version game, Blue.
As for why they didn't go with Red and Green as the colors for these versions, no idea. Possibly because Red and Green are typically viewed as christmas colors in the us, so the marketing would look weird when it released in the early part of the year, or perhaps because Americans tend to view Red and Blue as more opposite colors, so they could appeal to that "which version is better" hype and get kids all teamed up and competitive with the other versions so they'd want to trade and battle more. I don't fucking know.
Either way, Green *was* released in the US, it just happened to have been renamed and upgraded from it's original version, same as Red. That's why the gen 3 remakes are FireRed and LeafGreen, because those are the actual versions that were remade.
