Here’s why Pokemon Sleep took so long to arrive

Pokemon Sleep is perhaps one of the most curious offerings from The Pokemon Company in memory, and that’s saying something from the gaming giant that brought us Pokemon Dash and Eevee-themed cereal bowls.

The concept is simple – pop your phone next to you while you catch your 40 winks, and you’ll nab Pokemon overnight that match your sleeping style. You can then interact with them to become the greatest Pokemon collector in the world without having to do so much as get out of bed.

It’s a weird concept, but there’s no doubt that fans are ready to leap into bed to give it a go. Sorry, there’s no way to say that without it sounding bizarre. But, it looks like there was once a roadblock to the Pokemon Sleep release date – and it was actually a pretty sweet one.

Pokemon Sleep is late because its developers were sleeping

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No, we won’t give you five more minutes. In an incredibly adorable update offered in an interview with Famitsu (via Automaton), the team behind Pokemon Sleep has revealed that it has taken so long to develop because they could ultimately only playtest the game once a day – when they’d go to bed.

Select Games’ Keisuke Miyagawa said, “We struggled with testing the game because you have to sleep to do so. Basically, we could only do one test run per day.

“While it’s technically possible to proceed by using temporary sleep data, there is always a possibility of something unintended happening when actually sleeping, so we tried to have the testers sleep for real as much as possible.”

It’s pretty cute to imagine that playtesting a game would only amount to devs getting tucked up in bed, but it’s also easy to see why this would make the game’s progress dramatically slow down.

Pokemon Sleep is recording your farts

Annoyingly, we probably should have seen this coming. The app is obviously designed to keep an eye on you while you’re sleeping, and though its recording feature is probably designed for players to hear back their disturbances during the night, it’s instead reminding them that they’re absolutely ripping a** when unconscious. 

Pokemon Sleep has made a name for itself as an officially licensed Nintendo fart recorder, and if that was its intention, it’s certainly doing a good job. There’s almost definitely a pun in this to do with Poison-type Pokemon, but we’re serious journalists here.