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Perhaps unsurprisingly, the original 151 Pokémon were the result of a lot of trial and error when it came to character design, and not every idea made the final cut.
On Twitter, Pokémon designer James Turner shared an image from a manga about series’ creator and Game Freak founder Satoshi Tajiri, featuring designs of the original Pokémon. Some of them are instantly recognizable — Venonat, Voltorb, Gastly — but some of them never saw the light of day.
Fans have taken to the internet to show these almost-Pokémon some love by creating fan art dedicated to them, including pieces by one artist that recreates how Ken Sugimori might have rendered them in his distinctive style back in the 90s.
Some fans believe this image also gives further insight into Missingno encounters in Red and Blue. Missingno appears when the games get confused about which Pokémon the player should be encountering in that moment, but based on the numbers assigned to the Pokémon in the excerpt from the manga, including those that didn’t make it into the game, some Missingno appearances seem to be referencing the stored data of the unused Pokémon.
This gives a more accurate idea of what MissingNo actually are. They are not necessarily a leftover of Pokemon data that was inserted and then removed; they just had someone make numbered designs, and the Pokemon were inserted following those numbers, thus leaving empty slots. https://t.co/4zOCWfqMtw
— Crystal_ (@crystal_rby) May 17, 2018
To further cement this theory, it’s notable that one Missingno has a cry that none of the other 151 Pokémon has — it’s arguably the cry of a Pokémon whose data is in the game, but who doesn’t make an appearance.
What do you think of these Pokémon that ultimately never made it into Red and Blue?
Source: Kotaku
