Senior director of Pokopia, Shigeru Omor,i says that the game's concept comes from when he was working at Game Freak in 2001, and his first task was to place grass in Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire. "The foundation of the game, or rather the seed of the idea for the game, came from when I started work at Game Freak in 2001 on Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire and my job was to place the grass," Omori says. Pokemon devs "wanted to create a different type of game that's not an RPG" with Pokopia, but that "was a challenge" Pokemon Red and Green boss says the RPGs needed "a great deal of trial and error" to realize the devs' "simple concept" Pokopia lead wants to "scale" games "aside from battling," as "there are also lots of different ways to enjoy Pokemon" While plenty of people, myself included, are put off by the idea of touching grass, Omori wanted to share the joy of grass placement with the world. "When I'm working on a game I use something like an editor, and I place patches of grass, and Pokemon can jump out of these areas," he says. "Though I'm doing this as a creator, I found that it was very interesting. I wanted to make a game that would give users the experience of creating their own Pokemon world." With the announcement that the sky is the limit on the number of people that can create their own Pokopia island together, everyone can soon experience entry-level work on a mainline Pokemon game together. 90 minutes with Pokemon Pokopia convinced me this could be the biggest cozy game since Animal Crossing, and I'm already eager to spend hundreds of hours in it