Game Freak Hiring A 3D Modeler… But Don’t Get Too Excited

I thought I’d try to reel this one in before it spread to the far corners of the Internet. A recruitment page on the Game Freak website indicates that they’re looking to hire a 3D modeler. Now, before you get all excited about the thought of them working on a console Pokémon RPG, you might want to keep a couple things in mind:

1. Traditionally, console Pokémon games have always been handled by Genius Sorority. We’ve mentioned this before, but Genius Sorority is a company that was formed by key members of Heartbeat, a now-defunct company that developed the early Dragon Quests for Enix. The only other company to work on console Pokémon is Ambrella, who develop the WiiWare games.

2. Pokémon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum all use polygons for the environments, so technically, they are "3D Pokémon RPGs." Considering this recruitment drive seems to be for a single 3D modeler, my money’s on another DS game as the art could realistically be handled by a small team.

Now that that’s out of the way, I can play devil’s advocate.

Chances are high that HeartGold and SoulSilver will be the last mainline Pokémon games on the DS Lite. Nintendo will want to start pushing DSi harder next year, and what better way to do it than with their best-selling portable series?

The shift to a newer platform could bring some interesting changes with it as well, so perhaps something will come of this 3D models business after all.