The Sugimori Sketches: The Origin of Pokemon
Everyone under the age of 30 knows what Pokemon is. If you didn’t play the video games, card game, or watch the show as a kid, your sibling, cousin or classmate certainly did. Pikachu is just about as recognizable as the American flag.
For many people, Pokemon simply always has been around and the detailed origins of the franchise are hazy to them. Only big fans know who the creators of the game are, which is a bizarre concept if you think about it. In Western Culture, the creators of major franchises like Marvel’s Stan Lee or Harry Potter’s JK Rowling are household names. The average person knows who is responsible for some of the largest fandoms in history.
Why people don’t know Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori, the duo that created Pokemon is beyond me. Tajiri is seen by many as the creator of the concept of Pokemon, inspired by his childhood catching creatures by his home in rural Japan. Sugimori rarely gets his due from casual fans. He quite literally designed every one of the original 151 Pokemon as well as the design mechanics and aesthetic of the video games, card games, and anime.
Think about that. This man created every single Pokemon you know. The sheer amount of ideation, drawing, and design is hard to fathom, but Sugimori and his team have been doing it for over 20 years. All of your favorites began as an idea in this man’s head. Electabuzz? Yup. Charmander? You bet. Piplup? Of course.
Miraculously some sketches from Ken Sugimori have surfaced as scans online and show some early concept artwork. These sketches are the conceptual seeds that created the Pokemon franchise and serve as a rough representation of what the series would eventually become.
Each of these sketches deserves deep analysis, so that’s just what I’m going to do. Where shall we start?
Left: A trainer searches through a cave with his Pokemon and spots a wild Pokemon in the distance. It appears at first glance that this trainer is in the forest, but the dripping stalagmite suggests that they are in a cave, a common location to explore in the Pokemon world. If this is the Kanto Region this could be an early concept of Mt. Moon or Rock Tunnel. The Pokemon that accompanies the trainer outside of its Pokeball appears to be an early concept of a Rhydon. Fun Fact: Rhydon was the first Pokemon ever created by Ken Sugimori.
In the distance the trainer spots a wild Pokemon which appears to be emerging from an egg. This appears to be a Pokemon that was never created. It has a rough head and big eyes, perhaps because it is based off a lizard, which would make sense if it were coming out of an egg. In Generation 2, Pokemon Eggs were introduced as a way to acquire Pokemon through breeding. Sugimori clearly had a plan for eggs early on in the development of the universe.
The trainer also has a flashlight and a few other items attached to his belt. Sugimori could have intended to have a flashlight as an item that the character could acquire to see in dark caves. Instead of this flashlight, the HM Flash needed to be known by a Pokemon in your party. It would have been nice to have a flashlight instead of having to waste a move spot on Flash!
Right: Any fan of Pokemon can recognize pretty clearly what this is. As soon as you turned on your first game you were greeted by this scene of a Gengar fighting a Nidorino in some sort of a tournament, in front of a packed stadium crowd. This early drawing serves as the outline for all Pokemon battles. This 1 on 1 style showcases the Pokemon as characters within the game, and not just tools of battle.
This storyboard also shows animation notes showing how the Gengar and Nidorino will move while in combat. I remember seeing this scene and being hooked immediately, wanting to catch each of these Pokemon for my own to learn about their powers and how they could help me win battles.
Left: With a little bit of squinting it is pretty easy to tell that this is a storyboard that displays how Pokemon trades work. You can see the Pokeball getting sucked up into the digital cord as it travels across to the corresponding Gameboy. The concept is pretty meta because you are playing as a character within the Pokemon universe, seeing the Gameboy that you actually are playing on as it transfers your Pokemon to another player’s Gameboy. It’s simple when you think of them as symbols but otherwise, a bit confusing.
In the lower diagram you can see a drawing of an alien-like proto-Pokemon. No Pokemon ever really came to look like this but the long face and beady eyes are slightly similar to that of Krabby.
In the upper right diagram you can see a mammal-like proto-Pokemon that looks like a few Pokemon that came to be. It has the pointy ears and rounded face of Pikachu and the slightly elongated body and edged tail of Charmander. It could simply be a sketch of a Pokemon that wasn’t fully designed and shown for the storyboard’s purpose.
Right: In the top half of this page we see the first concept for what a Pokeball came to be. Many don’t realize that Pokeballs are based on the capsules that you receive when you buy a toy from a vending machine, or Gashapon. In Japan these machines are extremely popular, especially among children, so the concept of keeping a creature of your own inside a capsule is alluring.
We can also see that the mechanics of the ball changed from their original design. Here the button that unlocks the ball is on top, instead of in the front on the side of the sphere. This ball opens within itself instead of the more clamshell mechanic of how Pokeballs actually came to be used. More sketches regarding the foundation of Pokeballs can be found in the first generation of the Pokemon Manga, which have noticably different functionality than in the video games or anime.
The Pokemon that is emerging from this ball looks similar to the Pokemon that is accompanying the trainer in the cave picture above. In this photo its much smaller, showing us that Pokemon originally were shrunk down to fit into their Pokeballs, then perhaps grew to their normal size upon release. The small size of this Pokemon also hint that it could be an early Charmander, despite Charmander being a bit larger than this prototype as well.
Now we know that Pokeballs materialize the creatures into a light/plasma form to fit them into the device. This likely was an adjustment made to make sense of giant Pokemon being able to fit in such small spaces. This allows trainers to catch a variety of Pokemon of all sizes, not just ones that would fit in their pocket.
In the lower portion of this picture we can see a trainer approaching some sort of Pokemon shop, where he could be purchasing a creature from the vendor. We know that the games include PokeMarts where you can buy supplies to help you along your journey- like potions, repels, and escape ropes. You’ve never been able to purchase a Pokemon at an actual PokeMart. The only scenarios where you can purchase a Pokemon is from the Gamecorner in Celadon City, but it isn’t as straightforward as this.
We can also see aside from the supplies like Pokeballs and potions, that there are Pokemon in cages and vials behind the vendor. The Pokemon in the cage slightly resembles Bulbasaur without the bulb on its back and the Pokemon in the vial looks like some sort of embryo. Perhaps Sugimori wanted to have it so you could buy Pokemon in some sort of larval or embryonic form at these shops.
These images do show a certain degree of cruelty to animals as the Pokemon are trapped inside cages that are too small for them. In the Pokemon universe, wild Pokemon roam free and people treat them with more respect than simply treating them as products at a pet store. Perhaps we could learn something from this.
Left: Here we can see an in game location known as a “Hotel” which did not make it into the first video games fully. It appears as a lodge for trainers to stay and rest at for the night while traveling through the region. The front desk is reminiscent of a Pokemon Center where you heal your team in game.
In the anime, Ash has stayed the night at Pokemon Centers in this same fashion, so this concept has stuck in some way. In the video games you can rest at random homes and hotels, but never at a Pokemon Center. This could mean that hotels were meant to be a building that was in every town in the game.
There is a female trainer talking to an older looking male trainer in the forefront of the sketch. This could mean that you could originally choose your gender in game, which was a function that was not included until Pokemon Crystal. There likely wasn’t enough space in game to allow for alternate sprites, although it is known that famed game designer Satoru Iwata was a compression wizard and could fit an insane amount of content on the cartridges of the games he worked on.
Right: In the upper sketch you can see a male and female trainer having an exchange on a route outside of a small town. The male trainer wants to trade with the female trainer, but she is reluctant. Sugimori may have wanted to dislpay how an NPC trade would work in game. You approach another trainer and he offers up his Pokemon for yours, which has been a small aspect of every core Pokemon game.
In the lower sketch you can see a female trainer staying at one of the hotels and packing her bag for her adventure. Again, this may mean that female character options were designed for the games. This could also just be extra details to add in to show the expanse of the universe they were trying to build.
Left: At the top of this sketch we can see a Pokemon battle between a trainer’s Slowbro and a tamer’s Gastly. The tamer archetype was only in first generation games. Perhaps the development team thought whipping Pokemon was a cruel action to introduce to the young audience of the franchise. It makes sense that Sugimori would include this because he based his ideas from reality, where people often whip animals to train them.
Think about this though: he’s whipping a Gastly, which is basically a gas cloud and thus isn’t exactly a solid physical form. Regardless of that not making sense, this Gastly looks enormous which shows us that the ghost type was intended to be much larger originally.
The trainer’s Slowbro appears to be mostly similar to it’s final design. Perhaps this means that Slowbro was one of the first Pokemon with a finalized design. This battle could be a regular NPC battle as they appear to be in a rough environment with rocks, dust, and grass surrounding the fight.
In the lower sketch we can see a Staru slamming into a Blastoise during a trainer battle. Blastoise’s final design turned out a little less stout than this one with with smaller ears and eyes. Staryu looks to be a bit more roughly textured here, like an actual starfish. The final design for Staryu is a bit more smooth and robotic looking, with a focus on the jewel in the center of it’s body.
Right: This shows the storyboard of how a trainer throws a Pokeball at a Pokemon to catch from the back perspective. The creature at hand has the round and floaty shape of a Jigglypuff but a creepy humanlike face that no Pokemon was ever given (thank God). You can see the trainer throwing a ball and the prototypical creature that then breaks out of the ball. In the lower portion of the screen you can see that the ball is meant to sit on the ground where the Pokemon was standing, giving this space an unseen flat dimension.
Left: Here you can see a storyboard for how a Pokeball will shake when you capture a Pokemon inside of it. Veterans of the games know that this is a suspenseful moment. After any shake the creature could bust out of the sphere and possibly run away. This shows that this mechanic was always meant to challenge the player and that catching Pokemon with a ball was never a sure thing.
Here you can see a model for what a small town would look like in the Kanto Region. There is fountain with a trainer and his Pokemon looking at the water. This Pokemon looks to be the a form of Rhydon seen in previous sketches. We can also see a spiky haired character riding a bicycle through the town, which was a feature that was available in the first generation games.
On the left we can see a female character with long hair looking into a giant cage with a hippo-like creature inside of it. We didn’t get a hippo Pokemon until generation 4, so this character concept was not fully developed. We also rarely see Pokemon in cages during the game so it seems as if this real world animal control was removed in order to give the universe a more animal friendly tone.
To the right of the cage we can see what seems to be either a gym or the Pokemon shop that was profiled a few sketches before. There is what looks like a Metapod on top of the shop which could simply be a symbol of a store that sells them or a bug type gym. We did not see a bug type gym until generation 2, so this building concept was eventually modified into a PokeMart.
-Dan
