Exclusive: Palworld’s lead creator on his wild 2024, biggest dream for the game, and more

Talking Pals, PvP, Pokémon and topics that start with other letters, too.

Palworld. Screenshot: Pocketpair

“This is my first game,” Palworld developer Takuro Mizobe told me on a recent sunny afternoon in Los Angeles, as he took out his phone and loaded up a webpage on Nintendo’s website.

I was asking the lead creator of 2024’s biggest hit video game about the earliest phase of his development career. Back in 2010, he was still a college student and had participated in a one-year Nintendo Game Seminar, a training program for aspiring creators, in Tokyo.

He wanted to show me what he made. The game, called The Tentai Show, is an arcade-style shooting game for the Nintendo DS. It challenges players to stop meteoroids that are hurtling toward a planet that is positioned where the system’s dual screens meet.

Mizobe wanted me to notice that the game used both of the DS’ screens for gameplay, a contrast with how most DS games treated one screen as its main gameplay view and used the other for support functions.

“Nintendo wanted students to create a new game,” he said. “So I learned how to create a new game and think in a unique style of game development.”

Had he learned any lessons from working with Nintendo that stuck with him years later?

“Kind of,” he said with a laugh. “I always think: To make new things is very hard.

“In game development, of course, sometimes we have to do it, but, as much as possible, I try to avoid creating new things.”

You like to mix and match, I suggested, thinking back to 2021, when I’d last interviewed Mizobe.

“Yes,” he replied.

It was almost three years ago to the day that he was emphasizing to me that the then-upcoming Palworld was inspired a bit by Pokémon but even more by the hit survival game Ark.

In 2024, Mizobe’s penchant for mixing and matching has produced a monumental hit for Pocketpair, the studio he co-founded in 2015. Palworld lets players capture cute Pokémon-style creatures called Pals, dispatch them to build bases, and wield them to survive in a violent Ark-style world. This past January, Palworld had one of the hottest launches in gaming history, peaking at more than two million concurrent players a day. In Palworld’s first month, the game sold 15 million copies on PC, according to Pocketpair, and drew 10 million players on Xbox, where it has been bundled into Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service. 

Things have quieted since then, but Palworld is poised for some measure of comeback this week with Thursday’s release of the free Sakurajima update, which adds a new island, a player-vs-player arena and more. 

I’ve been wanting to talk to Mizobe about his incredible 2024, but the man keeps busy and gives few interviews. Some lucky breaks in L.A., however, led to an outdoors chat, at a bench and tables amid a campus of demo booths at the Summer Game Fest Play Days event. Mizobe had been juggling meetings and checking out some of the games on display. For a half hour, he had time to chat.

We discussed how his life had changed since January, his goals for Pocketpair and for Palworld and what advice he’d give to other developers hoping to score a hit.