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Game Freak’s Shigeki Morimoto was featured in a recent video on the company’s YouTube channel, in which he provides new details on Mew, the Pokémon he created.
To recap:
- Mew was originally released to only 20 players via CoroCoro in 1996 in Japan, and then to an additional 100 players in a second distribution. Each Mew was procedurally generated on Morimoto’s PC, with their own unique Pokémon IDs, and he had to trade each Mew one by one via Link Cable to the selected players. The time-consuming process of creating and trading made for the small amount of Mews distributed. A third distribution would later happen in Japan at World Hobby Fair.
- Morimoto, who was the director of Pokémon Emerald, helped plan the Old Sea Map event that led players to Mew on Faraway Island.
- Mew’s elegant, floaty movements in Pokémon: The First Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back were determined by the anime animators, not Game Freak or Morimoto. Today, Pokémon are created with the intent of turning them into 3D models, so the designers have a say in what the Pokémon’s animations will look like.
- Despite the fact that in-game lore states that Mewtwo was created in a lab from the DNA of Mew, Mew’s design was actually based on Mewtwo when the Pokémon was being created. Morimoto designed Mew to be a simpler-looking version of Mewtwo, primarily to take up less space on the Game Boy cartridges.
Here’s the original video, which is in Japanese:
Source: Siliconera
