 If there are good ideas in the world, I pick them up, and I don't necessarily have to be particular about originality. These are the words of Takuro Mizobi, the founder of Pocket Pear, the developers behind PAL World. In the past week, the studio has garnered a lot of attention for A, making one of the most widely popular games on Steam and Xbox Game Pass of, well, all time, and B, shall we say, wearing their inspiration on their sleeves. In a recent video, I explained how PAL World just about passes the squint test and circumvents intellectual property law so that it's safe from the Pokémon Company and Nintendo from a legal perspective, largely because, in addition to borrowing a lot from Pokémon games, it also borrows concepts from Ark Survival Evolved. This allows it to be just distinct enough to avoid infringing copyright even as it borrows and remixes large chunks of Pokémon character design. Perhaps the bigger question, though, is why. Why does Pocket Pear take this particular game design approach, the mashup approach, of taking various different ideas from different games and smushing them together in such a way that, while not necessarily particularly original or unique, makes something that is distinct enough to be considered its own game? To use the phrase mashup does feel appropriate because that is exactly how Pocket Pear's founder, Takuro Mizobi, describes the studio's creative process. In an absolutely fascinating interview with Wired from 2022, Mizobi explained that the studio borrows so heavily from other existing popular titles because making original games is very difficult. That's actually what he said, and he is not shy about admitting to this. Now bear in mind that the initial interview was conducted and published in Japanese, so do take this translation with a pinch of salt. And bear in mind that I'm trying my utmost hit to present this information free from my own personal bias, to simply relay what Mizobi said so that you're able to form your own opinions on his comments. I'm also avoiding the subject of AI for art generation within PAL World at the moment simply because that's such a large topic that it really does deserve a video in its own right, which may well be coming at a later date. With all of that in mind, here is why PAL World copies from Pokémon and Arc Survival evolved. I have always been interested in game development. The first time I created a game was during my third year at university, when I attended a game seminar sponsored by Nintendo. That year, I believed there were four teams of nine people per team, 36 people in total, and we took on the challenge of developing a game for the Nintendo DS. But to be honest, at the time, I thought, what I want to do now is not make games. Takuro Mizobi has become something of a controversial figure within the gaming sphere, largely because he has not come at game development from the same perspective as a lot of other game developers. In this interview with Wired, he goes into detail about how initially, while game design was something that appealed to him, he felt like he wanted to do something different when he first went out of university. The Nintendo approach to game design in particular just did not speak to him. Instead, he entered the financial sector, and by all accounts, did fairly well for himself, earning quite a fair amount of money which he's then able to use to fund his game development projects. Mizobi has also spent some time in the web sector, developing services which are by his own admission absolutely not original. Indeed, he says himself, his goal was to make something that was the Japanese version of LinkedIn, which he ultimately developed into stories.jp. It became its own thing eventually, but right off the bat the idea was, let me take something that already works, and do it slightly differently to make my own thing. When asked why game design didn't appeal to him at university, following this game design seminar that he attended that was sponsored by Nintendo, he said, I honestly didn't think it was worth it because making games was too difficult. I also loved Nintendo's culture, but I felt it didn't really fit me. For that reason, I got a job at JP Morgan after graduating, but although it was a great company and the pay was good, the work was not technically interesting. This then led Mizobi to experiment in the web sector and with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, leading him to the point where he was quite an experienced tech developer but still lacking a particular drive and still having a creative itch for game design that wasn't being scratched by his other projects. He ultimately said, I gradually realized that I wanted to create games as well, so I decided to start my own company and founded what is now PocketPair. Mizobi is fairly complimentary of the Nintendo approach to developing games, but at the same time has said that it is not for him specifically because of the amount of work that Nintendo puts in to making original concepts that are unlike anything else that are on the market. He said, when it comes to making games, Nintendo has a strong philosophy of creating new and unique games with high quality, and this was questioned at the Nintendo Game Seminar. On the other hand, I have a deep-rooted desire for my work to be enjoyed by as many people as possible, and to that end, if there are good ideas in the world, I pick them up, and I don't necessarily have to be particular about originality. I think it would be a good idea to create things in a way that just jumps on what is trendy. It's this approach of riding popular trends to get his work seen by as many people as possible that first influenced Mizobi's work in the web sector and then influenced his work in game development, and he said that he has taken a lot of ideas from his work in web services over to his game design projects. He said, quote, copying is commonplace in the world of web services. For example, Facebook copied Google's Circles feature from Google+. Other examples of how the world's largest companies are copying each other's web content include Instagram copying its Stories feature from Snapchat. I think the same is true in the world of games. Many fighting games follow the UI of Street Fighter II, and many car games are influenced by Hearthstone. Famous indie games in particular are often strongly influenced by past masterpieces. I believe that culture develops through imitation. So as he moved from web services over to game design, Mizobi brought this mash-up mentality with him, and he applied it to the studio's first major game, Over Dungeon, to limited success. He said, Over Dungeon was developed because I thought it would be an interesting idea to combine two card games, Slay the Spire and Clash Royale. However, when I actually tried it, I found that I couldn't get the balance right, and it was much more difficult to integrate the games than I had expected. On the other hand, I also discovered that by imitating multiple works, you can create something unique. It's similar to a mash-up in music. So for the next game we developed, Craftopia, we decided to take a fresh look and try to incorporate as much of the essence of games that we thought were interesting as possible. Craftopia serves very much as the template for Pal world, and a lot of the ideas from Craftopia migrated over to Pal World during the development of that game. Craftopia can be seen very much as the mash-up between Arc Survival Evolved and the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. And if you think I'm being reductive by describing it that way, that is exactly how Mizobi describes it. He said, I referenced the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild as a base, and added as many elements as I thought were interesting, such as crafting elements from Minecraft and animal husbandry elements from Dinosaur Survival Action Game Arc Survival Evolved. Naturally, there were a lot of bugs, and the game would fail, but I thought it was interesting, and I told the staff, I'll take responsibility for it, so keep working on it. This is possible because we are an independent company. It is worth remembering yet again that the reason why PocketPair is able to do any of this work is because of the independent wealth that Mizobi has brought along from his work in the web services and also from his work in the financial sector. Mizobi has also mentioned how the kernel of the idea of the pals in PAL World started in Craftopia, and they ended up just fleshing that out and developing it further. It's clear from the comments on our first video on PAL World that the gaming community is somewhat conflicted about how we feel as a whole about PAL World. Now as I said, I'm going to keep my own personal opinions to myself on this, beyond simply reiterating that I feel that Intellectual Property Lord just does not suit video games as it currently exists, but beyond that it is interesting to see this mash-up formula, which is very popular in other forms of creative entertainment, applied so strongly in the video game sphere. As mentioned, I've entirely ignored for the moment the large, very uncomfortable elephant in the room which is PocketPair's use of AI for art generation in games in the past, and indeed probably in PAL World. I think at a later date we'll potentially have a video on how AI can influence game development and how it's potentially influenced PAL World, but at the same time how there are limitations to what can be achieved with current AI technology regarding the kind of resources and the assets that you need to put into a video game. But we'll put all of that to one side for the moment. Ultimately, without wanting to colour things too far one way or the other on this, the moral of this story is simply that the mash-up formula that PocketPair has applied works like a charm. It has certainly achieved the objective of getting as much attention as possible. This is something that is well worth bearing in mind if you are a game developer, although you do also have to bear in mind that not all of that attention is necessarily positive, as the ongoing discourse surrounding PAL World shows. At the same time, something tells me that Mizorbi is not losing sleep over the negative comments while he sleeps on his giant pile of money.