Ishihara stated that "Gold" and "Silver" started development right after "Pokémon Red" and "Green" were released in Japan. The original intention was to release the game in 1998, even synchronizing with the supposed end of the anime's . Development issues, worsened by Game Freak being sidetracked with "Pokémon Stadium" and the localization of the first generation, led the game to be postponed, and the original release slate was taken over by "Pokémon Yellow". Programmer Shigeki Morimoto stated that part of why development took three and a half years was due to being a small team of only four programmers. Satoru Iwata, then the president of HAL Laboratory who would later become Nintendo's CEO, helped the team by developing new tools for compressing the Pokémon graphic code.