Seemingly as part of its ongoing lawsuit against Palworld's developer, Pocketpair, Nintendo applied for several patents to protect what it saw as intellectual property being ripped from Pokémon games. One of those early patent filings at the Japanese Patent Office (JPO) described effectively the creature capture mechanics you see in most Pokémon and similar games these days. The patent describes the game mechanic as throwing an object at a character, after which the computer determines whet...