Pocket Monsters Green Beta: Lavender Town Music

It’s fairly well known that Pocket Monsters for the Gameboy was a huge hit when it came out in early 1996 in Japan. It’s also fairly well known that the Lavender Town music was changed before the western release of the game. There are wild stories and mass speculation pertaining to this. In particular, rumors circulated of binaural beats and high-pitched frequencies being used in the original music to induce feelings of discomfort, which went almost entirely unnoticed by adults. There are also claims of children, usually close to 100 in number, committing suicide because of the music. What isn’t fairly well known is that the children who died were actually part of a pre-release playtest group in late 1995, consisting of around 1,000 children from the Osaka area aged between 6 and 12 years old. These children were all given a beta copy of the game on a legitimate-looking cartridge, and allowed to play at their discretion. Many of the children got as far as Lavender Town, but few continued playing after that. O