Playing Pokémon by ear
A blind gamer kept playing his favorite franchise, until a recent change made that impossible. Plus: Nintendo weighs in on accessibility.
After Ross Minor was blinded in 2006, he still wanted to play Pokémon.
He was a kid. Eight years old. And he found a way.
“I listened to all my friends playing the game, and I would hear the soundtrack and be like, ‘Oh, I remember that. That song plays when you're in this town.’ So I learned that each town has a different song.
“Then I learned that each Pokémon has a different cry… All the attacks make different sounds.
“The cherry on top was that, when you run into a wall, it plays this boom-boom sound. So, through that alone, I was able to memorize all the games and form this mental map—and beat the games completely by myself without sighted assistance.”
Minor played 2007’s Pokémon Diamond and Pearl that way, then 2011’s Black and White, and then more as each year’s new Pokémon game came out.
For over a decade, his strategy worked. But 2019’s Pokémon Sword and Shield added navigation in three dimensions, and Minor struggled to draft a mental map. He needed assistance from sighted players.
Then came 2022’s Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. Those, Minor told me, “are just completely inaccessible.”
This is what happens, Minor explained, when a video game’s accessibility for players with disabilities is accidental or unintentional.
Players like him can get left behind.
I met Minor in June at a showcase in Los Angeles for upcoming Ubisoft games. We were seated in a lounge waiting for our respective appointments. I was biding my time to play Star Wars Outlaws. He had a few minutes free before hands-on with The Rogue Prince of Persia.
He was introduced to me as a gaming accessibility consultant. He’d done work for Ubisoft and other game publishers before, though at this event he was hoping to play these new games for the first time.
We were talking about Pokémon and the idea of intentional vs. accidental accessibility, a notion he’d first heard from the late gaming accessibility pioneer Brandon Cole. It’s the idea that some developers put intentional effort into making their games playable for people with disabilities. Such games might include text-to-speech read-outs of menus, alternate color schemes for players with colorblindness, and so on. Other games don’t, but, if a player such as Minor is lucky, they’ll still be playable.
The old Pokémon games were like that, he said.
At the Ubisoft event, Minor was hoping to play the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Shadows. It was running just a few feet away from us, but he was uncertain an open world game like that would run well for him.
“Those are traditionally the most difficult to make accessible for blind people,” Minor said. “But not to say it can't be done.”
He’d later tell me about trying to play last year’s open-world Assassin’s Creed Mirage. He’d appreciated a feature in which the game’s text-to-speech system read out the player’s active mission objective whenever the player happened to point their character toward a mission marker. It helped him orient himself. (A Ubisoft rep confirmed to me that that was an intentional accessibility option).
In L.A., after a few minutes chatting, Minor and I went off to play different games. He headed to Prince of Persia and, later, Star Wars. He had a particularly good time with the latter. The developers had enabled audio descriptions of the game’s cutscenes, which helped him understand what was happening during cinematic moments. He also was pleasantly surprised that he could pick locks in the third-person adventure. Outlaws, like many games before it, has a mini-game for that. It’s rhythm-based, which allowed Minor to get a feel for it and proceed.
“I don’t know if that was intentional or not, but regardless, I think it’s really cool,” he later told me. “Any time where you can avoid the ‘Skip Puzzle’ option is great.”
In the world of video game accessibility, there are the companies and teams who’ve built reputations for pushing accessibility forward—Microsoft, Naughty Dog, EA, Ubisoft and more—and those who have not, which is why it was shocking, just two weeks after my conversation with Minor to see Nintendo—the publisher of Pokémon, if not the developer—talking about accessibility. And, at that, they were talking about accessibility for players like Minor.
At the company’s 84th annual meeting of shareholders, an attendee asked the following question:
I believe there are people with visual impairments out there who would like to play games. Please describe any initiatives Nintendo is undertaking for these people.
Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa replied:
We want many people around the world to play our games. I won't go into specific details about our efforts here, but we will continue to make various efforts to ensure that many people can enjoy our games, including those with visual impairments as well as others who have difficulty playing.
This was, as best I could tell, the most directly Nintendo had ever been held to account about accessibility in their games.
While competitors’ games are often rich with alternate settings for players with low vision or limited hearing, Nintendo’s games ship with few, if any, accessibility options.
Last year’s blockbuster The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, for example, offers little by way of accessibility beyond the long-standard option to invert the controls for the game’s camera.
“As a company, Nintendo is often met with controversy within the disability community,” journalist Grant Stoner wrote last November in an IGN article about the accessibility of another major 2023 Nintendo release, Super Mario Wonder. But that game, he noted, turned out to be accessible to many player with disabilities thanks to the exclusion of time limits on its 2D levels and the inclusion of unlockable, optional badges that made jumping easier and less treacherous. Those were great examples of “inclusive design,” Stoner wrote, using a term for a game that provides “accessibility without settings in a menu.”
When Minor and I spoke again, he hadn’t yet heard about Furukawa’s remarks.
He’d been in Hawaii on vacation, where he had gone surfing and had some fun trouncing some friends who’d worried he wouldn’t be able to compete with them in Smash Bros. (He estimates he won 75% of the time; stereo sound in the game helps a lot, he noted).
Minor wasn’t sure what to make of the statement from Nintendo. On the one hand, he thought it could be a hint of better future plans. Or, he mused, they could have just been trying to move on to the next question.
Minor started doing consulting work on video games in 2018. Back then, Electronic Arts contacted him to offer some insight about what blind players could and couldn’t do in their Madden NFL games. The studio was toying with vibration feedback for certain in-game moments.
Later, he worked with Microsoft on the 2018 pirate game Sea of Thieves to help make it more accessible. The open-world aspect of the game has been a challenge for blind gamers. Players can sail their ship in any direction and enemy cannon fire can come in from all side, making for a potentially disorienting experience. But Sea of Thieves’ focus on team play has been a boon. Blind gamers, Minor said, gravitated toward sailing the ship. “The helm has really good haptics,” he said. “You could feel when the wheel is centered. You can feel the notches when you’re turning it.”
Minor said that Sea of Thieves dev studio Rare leaned into that bit of unintentional accessibility by commissioning some intentional assistance to go with it: one feature that Minor worked on intensifies the sounds of waves lapping at rocks. It was added to the game last year. “Now blind sailors can navigate around the rocks without needing sighted assistance,” he said. (He’s hoping they might add sound effects for enemy ships so that blind gamers could also sail effectively during a battle).
“People think that disabled people don't want to don't play games, so they don't develop for them,” Minor said. “But if you give them the tools, then out of nowhere it's like, ‘Oh, wait a minute, all these people are showing up.’”
He, of course, would be happy to add another client to his resume: “Nintendo, if you're reading this, I'd love to work with you,” he said.
In the wake of Furukawa’s comments to shareholders, I asked Nintendo what more they could share about the company’s current or future plans for accessibility in its games.
I soon hear back from a Nintendo rep, who shared this statement from the company:
“Nintendo endeavors to provide products and services that can be enjoyed by everyone. Our products offer a range of accessibility features, such as button-mapping, motion controls, a zoom feature, grayscale and inverted colors, haptic and audio feedback, and other innovative gameplay options.
“In addition, Nintendo’s software and hardware developers continue to evaluate different technologies to expand this accessibility in current and future products.”
The suite of accessibility options Nintendo mentions in its statement are offered at the system level of the Switch. It does not address the ongoing lack of accessibility options in its games.
The statement also isn’t necessarily illustrative of any future plans. It’s nearly identical to a statement the company gave to Vice Motherboard in 2019 (a few words were added to acknowledge other accessibility settings on the Switch).
The Switch system still lacks some core accessibility features present in the Xbox Series and PS5 consoles, including a screen-reader. The Switch, launched in 2017, is very old. The pending announcement of the Switch’s successor by the end of March 2025 will give the company an opportunity to establish a new baseline for how its hardware works for players with disabilities.
The Pokémon Company, contacted by Game File earlier this week, did not have a comment about the accessibility of its games by press time.
Back in 2019, when he was a swimmer in the Paralympics, Ross Minor got a tattoo. He medaled twice that year, which was also pretty cool. But the tattoo is something else: From his right elbow up to his shoulder, the serpentine Pokémon Gyarados bursts from the water.
“I would not have gotten a Gyarados tattooed on my arm if this game didn't mean so much to me,” he said.
He’d played those games as a kid.
He’d stuck with them after he couldn’t see.
He’d listen so closely to each adventure, forming those mental maps.
He didn’t know what the new Pokémon he encountered looked like, but he formed a rough mental image based on the sounds they’d make. If he was lucky enough to get a plushie or figurine of one of the new Pokémon, he’d run his fingers over it to understand their shape.
He used his love of those Pokémon video games to connect.
“Because of their unintentional accessibility, I was able to show my friends at school, ‘Hey, ‘I still like this game. I still want to do this.’
“‘Just because I can't see it,’” he recalled thinking, “‘doesn't mean I'm different from you in any capacity.’”
Item 2: In brief..
🎮 Capcom reported a 33% drop in sales and a 46% drop in operating income (down to ¥12.8 billion, or $83 million) for spring 2024 compared to the year prior. It blamed a tough comparison, given the launch of Street Fighter 6 in June 2023, compared to a light release line-up for spring ‘24.
The company still expects both numbers to be up for the full year ending March 31, 2025, thanks to “release timing of new titles.” That suggests major Capcom releases by then, most likely Monster Hunter Wilds, which currently has the vague release date of 2025. A remaster of Dead Rising and a compilation of Marvel vs. Capcom fighting games are slated for late 2024.
💰 The number of mergers and acquisitions in gaming is back on the rise, with 52 announced deals in the second quarter of 2024, according to the latest quarterly gaming deals report from Drake Star.
The biggest for the quarter was private equity firm EQT’s $3 billion purchase of Keywords.
Private investment in game companies has been flat, according to the report, with 40% of the disclosed investment going to blockchain companies. That includes $140 million raised by Web 3 “metagame” firm Zentry.
🚀 Eve Online development studio CCP is keeping quiet about its previously announced blockchain-based game Project Awakening, given the negative sentiment about the tech in much of the gaming community, per a report in The Reykavík Grapevine about Icleand’s gaming scene.
“Like many things, it’s controversial because it can be used for good and bad,” CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson said of blockchain. “But at some point we just stopped talking about it because it’s been made clear. The game is not about the technology it’s built on. It’s about what it enables. Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding, and we will let the game speak for itself.”
🤔 Twitch is still losing money, a decade after Amazon bought the streaming platform for nearly $1 billion, the Wall Street Journal reports.
👀 Bethesda Montreal studio director Yves Lachance is jumping to WB Montreal, WB Games announced today. Lachance had been at Bethesda since 2015.
🚫 The end of the Mario & Sonic series of Olympic video games is due to the International Olympics Committee’s desire to bring the license for the Olympics “back to themselves internally and look at other partners, so they would get more money,” a former developer on the M&S series tells Eurogamer.
The only official video game for the 2024 Olympics is nWay’s free-to-play mobile-centric Olympics Go. That studio is also making Olympics NFTs.
💕 An upcoming game called Date Everything is a sandbox dating game set in a house and allows players to date anthropomorphized versions of a washing machine, vacuum cleaner, smoke alarm and about 100 other things, per a new trailer.
Awesome drive into the accessibility issue! And poo-poo on Nintendo for saying they offer features that are on the development-side, but not really the player side, ESPECIALLY on their own games.