Originally posted by GlitterBerri
It's not fake, I actually translated this on Reddit for lulz, but I can't find it anymore. Here you go again:
Gathered from Gamefreak's official website in Dec. 1997:
Picture 1: From left to right, we see Kokaana, Kasanagii, and Name Unknown.
Picture 2: From left to right, we see Nyoromo [Poliwag], Nyoroppi, and Nyoosuka.
PIcture 3: Hakuryuu's [Dragonaire] final form?!
"Could these be some of the new Pokémon appearing in Pokémon 2?!" ...is what the authors of this magazine exclaimed, jumping to conclusions. (Sorry about that!)
They're actually early designs for Beedle [Weedle] (the first picture), Nyoromo [Poliwag] (the second picture) and Hakuryuu [Dragonaire] (the third picture). It seems that these characters that appeared in the initial Pokémon game were once planned to look like this.
Why were they changed...?!
"We wanted Beedle's [Weedle] final evolution to be cool, so that's why we decided on Spear [Beedrill]. It was the same with Nyoromo's [Poliwag] final evolution, Nyorobon [Poliwrath]. Nyoosuka, in the second picture, doesn't look very strong, so players who did their best to evolve their Nyoromo [Poliwag] wouldn't have been too happy if we'd used him.
- Atsuko Nishida (Designer)
Dragonaire didn't undergo a large transformation, but its final design is stylish and refined. They really poured a lot of love and attention to detail into each individual Pokémon, and ended up creating the cool and much-loved characters of today!
Thanks for your efforts GlitterBerri! Sorry, I should have posted this earlier, but not too long after I posted that, I later rediscovered the sprites on a thread on TGBUS, thanks to Google Image search. I had previously erroneously assumed that the sketches were real and the sprites were fake. In fact, the sketches were nothing more than The Lost Pokémon's fan art, while the sprites were real.
I got in touch with Redstar; who is the moderator of a site about Pokémon's early history (specifically Pokégod rumours) which is affiliated with Lost Pokémon. He told me that an associate of his had translated the image before (wimscoot, unless that's you?), and he linked me to this. However, it was only a partial translation.
Thank you so much again for your more thorough translation of the image! I'm actually a fan of your website, and read your translated version of the Pokémon 2 Staff Interview.
I was intrigued by this, as it noted that there were over 200 Pokémon designed for the first games. This is supported by Capsule Monsters designs annotated with numbers greater than 150 and the fact that Shigeki Morimoto apparently confirmed to Zog on Smogon that there were 190 Pokémon planned. I believe that the Missingno. were deleted Pokémon, because as IIMarckus notes, not only do nine of the 39 Missingno. have unused cries, but all of them have data telling them not to evolve or learn any moves as if they were real Pokémon and I was thinking that possibly these sprites were remnants of the original 190 programmed (or left to be added later).
The former translation on Tumblr seemed to confuse the text as suggesting the sprites were planned for Pokémon 2, but now thanks to your translation I know that this isn't the case without further proof. Then in your translated interview Tajiri notes 'they' already had over 350 designs when developing Pokémon 2. I wonder if some of these were prototype Pokémon from Nintendo Spaceworld 1997 and other places? It would probably be a good idea if somebody did a text dump of the Japanese Gold/Silver, to see if the prototype Pokédex data still exists (there was definitely some 'yet to be discovered', or something along those lines filler text in the Spaceworld 1997 demo). |
tag019/Pok%C3%A9mon_Red_and_Blue_sandbox.
