BODY: "I left something behind in 1996, so I came back to get it."
That line, posted by ryo alongside the video, is the entire pitch for the newest song in Pokémon's long-running Hatsune Miku collaboration. On October 23, the project — officially Pokémon feat. Hatsune Miku Project VOLTAGE High↑, known in Japan simply as Pokémiku — released "1996," written, composed, arranged, performed and mixed by ryo of supercell.
The title is a date, and Japanese fans needed no explanation. Pocket Monsters Red and Green launched on the Game Boy on February 27, 1996. The music video follows two children filling out their Pokédex and chasing the rumors that might let them catch Mew — the schoolyard folklore of trucks, ghosts and glitches that defined a generation's first encounter with the series. The MV's story was developed by ryo together with fellow Vocaloid producer Machigerita, with guitars by Hiroki Matsumura.
ryo described the track as "a story about us, now that we've grown up," saying he was moved watching two Pokémon-obsessed kids argue over who could name more creatures, and realizing that the argument itself would one day be the memory. "If it makes someone think of a particular person while they listen, I'd be happy."
"1996" arrived one day after "LEGENDS," also by ryo — a two-night opening salvo for High↑, the revived second phase of a project that began in August 2023 as a collaboration between The Pokémon Company and Crypton Future Media. The original run paired eighteen Miku designs with the eighteen Pokémon types, each with its own song built from series BGM and sound effects.
The insider take
Booking ryo to open this phase is not a casual choice, and Tokyo's Vocaloid circles read it immediately. ryo wrote "Melt" in 2007 and "World Is Mine" in 2008 — the two tracks that turned Hatsune Miku from a piece of synthesis software into a cultural figure. He is, in practice, the single producer most responsible for the Miku that Pokémon is collaborating with. Putting him on a song called "1996" fuses two Japanese nostalgia timelines at once: the Game Boy kids of the mid-90s and the Nico Nico generation of the late 2000s. Both groups are now in their thirties and forties, and both are exactly who this release is aimed at.
Originally reported by 4Gamer.net − 最新記事 (Japanese).