>>48325660>Crystal killed pokemania.>No, that was Ruby & Sapphire.You're both wrong. Pokemon was dying out by 2001 because all fads eventually die out, not because of Ruby and Sapphire and certainly not because of Crystal. It's true that the inability to transfer from the GBC games to Ruby and Sapphire alienated many of the remaining fans who stuck around after the fad died down, but that's Nintendo's fault, not GameFreak's.
Here's what Junichi Masuda's said regarding the development of Ruby and Sapphire:
"At the time, the atmosphere and general thinking was that the Pokémon fad was over and there was huge pressure to prove people wrong. The next time I visited it was all Star Wars. Everyone was saying it was on a downtrend, the fad’s over and I really felt that pressure to make something amazing...
With Ruby and Sapphire, the screen got a little longer and it was a different aspect ratio, a lot more colors and sound channels so the tech was improved dramatically. It allowed us to do a lot more and gave us more freedom, but at the same time it made it take a lot longer to do things and was more resource-intensive.
After Gold and Silver came out, it was a huge hit around the world, but shortly after everyone was saying, ‘That’s it. The Pokémon fad is over! It’s dead!’ It was a very stressful project, for sure. When we were first developing it, I had the idea in mind that it would be Ruby and Sapphire, and then the next games, including the titles, would be Diamond and Pearl, and in between we would do the remakes, FireRed and LeafGreen, so we could create this structure where you could take the Pokémon from the Kanto region to the Diamond and Pearl games."
