Translation of Digimon Pendulum Developers' Interview from Pendulum Art Book

[MarcFBR]

Time for another interview! (It ended up being a V-Pet kind of night it seems.)



This time it's another interview from the Pendulum Art Book!

Garm has translated the Digimon Pendulum Developers’ Interview over at her blog.



It's an interview with a few different people who worked on the Digimon Pendulum (in various forms) including:
Makoto Kitagawara: Worked on the Tamagotchi and Digimon V-Pets, along with appearing at tournaments and in guidebooks as Kitagawa-meijin.
Kenji Watanabe: Longtime Digimon designer.
Yuusuke Maekawa: Worked on the Digital Monster Ver. 20th, along with planning and development of the Pendulum Ver. 20th and Digivice Ver. 15th.
Daimu Taoka: An employee of Bandai's Boy's Toy Department. He worked on the Pendulum Ver. 20th and the life-size Digimon plushes He would perhaps bet be known to fans under the pseudonym Big Dreamer Taoka.



Throughout the interview they discuss various elements of the brand including a bit on it's early days, with it's main focus being on (of course) the Pendulum and the Pendulum 20th.

There is some amusing stories told. I won't spoil anything, but a few things of note are.... information on the current version of the Pendulum shell, how early V-Pets stored the sprites in a way that caused issues later, what they hope to see and do with Digimon V-Pets in the future, and even details of things they planned that never ended up happening.



We also have a translation of the Digimon Designers’ Special Talk from the Pendulum art book right here, along with a breakdown of the artbook itself here.



We plan to archive it later here, but for now head to garm's blog and give it a read.

 

[saifors]

So Kitagawara was the one who laid out the initial plan for Digimon, that would mean, was that known already?
Talks for Digimon started during the development of the second generation of tamagotchi, specifically during documentation, so I assume it's the equivalent of Game Design Document for virtual pets. That would mean the Digital Monster Ver 1 started planning between Nov. 23 1996 and February 1st 1997. Initially as OOkotutchi Until probably around april of 1997 when most likely what was mentioned in a previous interview of a certain other franchise getting big with the release of their anime causing all those early designs getting scrapped because of similarities.
Slowly but surely with more interviews more of the early development of Digimon is finally getting revealed.

Another thing of note is that it was to be a one-off and a version 2 was made because it caught on.

 

[Deep Saver]

I wonder what all those cheats in the original Digital Monster pets were? Just goes to show that there's still more unknowns around those old toys.

 

[DigiKing Tamer]

I would love for them to introduce colored LCDs! They could always take pointers from that Xros Wars related toy.

 

[Muur]

Not being coloured in 2010, never mind 2020, is ridiculous IMO.

anyway, I did enjoy the interview.

 

[md_aths03]

I also wonder which version they referred to when giving a certain number of protein,your digimon will guarantee win the battle.