The player controls the protagonist from an overhead perspective and navigates the fictional region of Kanto in a quest to master Pokémon battling.

[7] The ultimate goal is to complete the entries in the Pokédex, a comprehensive Pokémon encyclopedia, by capturing, evolving, and trading to obtain all 151 creatures.

[10] Moreover, the English versions are incompatible with their Japanese counterparts, and such trades will corrupt the save files, as the games use different languages and therefore character sets.

[15] Pokémon Red and Blue are notable for a large quantity of glitches, possibly due to their scope in comparison to Game Freak's development experience at the time.

Once the badges are acquired, the player is given permission to enter the Kanto League in the Indigo Plateau, which consists of the best Pokémon Trainers in the region.

This is one distinct region, as shown in later games, with different geographical habitats for the 151 existing Pokémon species, along with human-populated towns and cities and Routes connecting locations with one another.

He thought kids could relate with the Pokémon by individually naming them, and then controlling them to represent fear or anger as a good way of relieving stress.

[29] The concept of trading Pokémon was inspired by a frustrating experience Tajiri had while playing Dragon Quest II: Luminaries of the Legendary Line.

[30] When the Game Boy was released, Tajiri thought the system was perfect for his idea, especially because of the link cable, which he envisioned would allow players to trade Pokémon with each other.

[36] Sugimori, in turn, finalized each design, drawing the Pokémon from various angles in order to assist Game Freak's graphics department in properly rendering the creature.

He composed the opening theme, "Monster", with battle scenes in mind, using white noise to sound like marching music and imitate a snare drum.

[43] Masuda wrote the music at his home on a Commodore Amiga computer, which only features PCM sample playback and converted to the Game Boy with a program he had written.

[49] Several months later, Pocket Monsters Blue was released in Japan as a mail-order-only special edition[50] to subscribers of CoroCoro Comic on October 15, 1996.

[56] During the translation process, it became apparent that simply altering the text from Japanese to English was impossible; the games had to be entirely reprogrammed from scratch due to the fragile state of their source code, a side effect of the unusually lengthy development time.

[50] As the finished Red and Blue versions were being prepared for release, Nintendo allegedly spent over 50 million dollars on promotion, fearing the series would not be appealing to American children.

[73] Future Nintendo president Satoru Iwata later said that people likely felt Yellow would be unnecessary due to the release of Pokémon Gold and Silver later that year.

[82] A special Nintendo 2DS bundle was released in Japan, Europe, and Australia on February 27, 2016, with each console matching the corresponding color of the game version.

He praised the replay value due to their customization and variety and commented upon their universal appeal: "Under its cuddly exterior, Pokémon is a serious and unique RPG with lots of depth and excellent multiplayer extensions.

Papers published until 1999 by the Columbia Business School indicate both American and Japanese children prefer the actual gameplay of a game over special audio or visual effects.

[98] "With all the talk of game engines and texture mapping and so on, there is something refreshing about this superlative gameplay which makes you ignore the cutesy 8-bit graphics" commented The Guardian.

[71] GameSpot's Cameron Davis called it a "stopgap" to appease players until the release of Gold and Silver, commenting that "the new challenges are enough to fill the hole – but only just".

[111] Pokémon Red, Green and Blue ultimately sold 10.23 million copies in Japan,[112] and until November 2022, was the country's best-selling video games.

[119] In Germany, they became the first video games to receive two Special Prize awards from the Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland (VUD) for sales above 2 million copies by early 2001.

[130] The standard cartridge sold over 600,000 units in its first week and one million copies within ten days, becoming the fastest-selling handheld game of all time when it was released.

[143] Yellow became the fastest-selling Pokémon games in the United Kingdom,[144] where it received a Double Platinum award from ELSPA for more than 600,000 sales[145] and grossed more than £20 million or $30,000,000 (equivalent to $55,000,000 in 2024).

[146] In Germany, Yellow received a Double Platinum award from the Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland (VUD) for sales above 400,000 copies by early 2001.

Its unique blend of exploration, training, battling and trading created a game that was far more in-depth than it first appeared and one that actually forced the player to socialize with others in order to truly experience all that it had to offer.

George Harrison, the senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications of Nintendo of America, stated that "those precious gems [Pokémon Red and Blue] have evolved into Ruby and Sapphire.

The project was a crowdsourced attempt to play a modified version of Pokémon Red by typing commands into the channel's chat log, with an average of 50,000 viewers participating at the same time.

[158] In 2017, The Strong National Museum of Play inducted Pokémon Red and Green to its World Video Game Hall of Fame.