Pokemon is truly a unique franchise, and to date we have never really seen any game similar to its style that has had its success. Sure, we’ve seen developers come up with similar ideas, but it’s usually quite hard to beat the original. Recently it has been revealed that EA was one of those companies that tried to compete with the franchise.Speaking during an episode of the GameHugs podcast (via Nintendo Everything), EA’s former creative director Nic Watt revealed that at one point in time, EA had plans to create a Pokemon competitor that they were going to release on the Nintendo DS handheld console, but safe to say that did not go through.
According to Watt, “EA wanted this game where the idea and it was going to be their Pokémon game. They didn’t have an RPG in the handheld space and they really wanted one. We did a lot of paper-based prototyping for the battle mechanics and even made a whole card game. Then we got the people from Criterion – who worked on Burnout and with the studio – in [to test it].”
However it seems that the game kept being reset and never really left the prototype stage. Watt claims that when he left EA, it was still not even in full production yet. We’re not sure if EA has shelved the idea (we wouldn’t be surprised if they did), but companies do kill of projects from time to time. A quick look at Blizzard and their cancelled Warcraft Adventures, StarCraft Ghost, and their next-gen MMO Project Titan will serve as pretty good examples.