Four Scrapped Gen I Pokemon Designs Revealed for the First Time!

Four scrapped Pokemon designs from Pokemon Red & Green have been revealed in a manga releasing today in Japan about the life of Pokemon creator Satoshi Tajiri!

James Turner of Game Freak, who designed Pokemon like Golurk and Buzzwole, posted a photo of one of the pages. It reveals some old Pokemon designs and names.

The scrapped Pokemon designs are…

• #56 Diaa (“Deer”)
• #62 Kurokki (“Crocky,” as in crocodile)
• #67 Kakutasu (“Cactus”)
• #68 Jaggu (As in “jag,” like the jagged spear protruding from its shark head)

The design of “Deer” may have been recycled into Stantler, though it looks more like a moose. And of course we got completely different crocodile, cactus, and shark designs in later games with Krookodile and Feraligatr, Cacnea and Cacturne, and Sharpedo. They probably thought “these designs aren’t good, we can probably turn their base concepts into something better.” And of course they did!

The sprites of the other known Pokemon match their Pokemon Red & Green sprites. Some of the Pokemon have the same Japanese names as they do now, but the names for Farfetch’d, Blastoise, Rhydon, and Spearow are different. The numbers in the upper lefthand corner of each sprite seem to roughly correspond to the Pokemon’s internal index number in the games. While some like Diglett and Venonat have the same index numbers, others like Blastoise and Tangela are transposed.

There are also some unused Pokemon names on the ticket to the left of the image, like “Boo,” but it’s hard to determine if they were scrapped Pokemon or early names for Gen I Pokemon (for example, could “Boo” be Haunter or Gengar?). Some of the names are obvious prototypes.

Thanks goes to Bangiras for the translations!