Today I was thinking about Pokemon's type system, and what we know about it from development data and interviews with the development team. I was going to make it a twitter thread, but it got so long I decided it would be better as a mini-article here. (A lot of this comes from Helix Chamber's thoughts and what FlowersBloom has posted on twitter: I'm collecting some of that here and then adding my own analysis). I've mentioned some of this in the blog proper, and in comments; I just figured I'd organize my thoughts here.
At the very beginning of Pokemon's development, we knew the team had an idea for some sort of elemental attacks in their battle system. Designers have said that without such a system, the game would have too much linearity to it: some Pokemon would just be strictly better than others, simply based on their stats. They wanted a rock/paper/scissors system in which a weaker Pokemon would be able to beat a stronger one in cases where it was advantaged, making the choice of which Pokemon to pick not simply a matter of crunching the numbers. To this end, the first three types were Fire, Water, and Electric. We know that in the earliest versions of Generation I, the stats “Special, Type1, and Type2” were originally “Fire,” “Water,” and “Electric.” We’re not sure exactly what these stats did: were they affinities, or defense, or both? My guess is that they were both Attack and Defense for each of those elements (like the final Special Stat is both defense and attack) to show how attuned each ‘Mon was to each element. Thus, you might have a Pokemon that was strong in Fire and Electric, but has low stats in Water, meaning that it would take lots of damage from Water but be much more effective with the other types. Thus, the game started with a less binary system than the finished type system: rather than a Pokemon just being "Fire type," you would have Pokemon with lower or higher stats in "Fire," making their power in this type more of a continuum than simply "super effective" or "not effective." Helix Chamber has claimed that the early inspiration for Pokemon was the SaGa battle system that features in both the early Saga games and Final Fantasy Legends 2 and 3 (which were SaGa games in Japan). In those games, monsters had a selection of different elemental attacks, plus physical attacks, and different defenses against either. Early Pokemon probably worked like this: monsters would learn generic physical attacks, like Pound, Scratch, or Body Slam, based upon how strong they were and what physical attributes they had, and then they'd learn a selection of elemental special abilities. This is more or less the origin of the Normal type as well. The physical abilities these monsters learned probably had no elemental attribute, but interacted with the physical defense the opposing monster had. Thus, the Attack stat and the Defense stat reflected a Pokemon's ability to use typeless (or Normal) moves, and the Fire/Water/Electric stats interacted with the special attacks these 'mons learned. Importantly, a lot of the early move sets we have feature an interesting mechanic: first stage Pokemon usually didn't learn any special moves, but tended to use only physical moves until they evolved (Growlithe, Ekans, and Poliwag are the most clearcut examples of this trend). This probably means that Fire, Water, and Electric were seen kind of like magic in Final Fantasy: more powerful moves that the character would have to develop. It also implies that at one point, first stage mons were seen as similar to regular animals, and they only gained mystical powers once they evolved. Fighting might have existed at the same time as these, or it might have been created soon after, as an enhanced version of Normal. Fighting moves are interspersed with Normal moves in the move list, and so the idea was probably that just like Growlithe would evolve to use Fire moves, some purely physical Pokémon would grow to develop fighting skills, which were upgraded normal moves. At first, it was probably the case that Fighting moves were just more powerful Normal moves, but at some point, the team must have decided they had to be differentiated-- presumably because Defense was less effective against them, or something like that. The next five types were Flying, Poison, Ground, Grass, and Psychic, though it isn’t clear what order they were developed. It appears that after the original Fire/Water/Electric affinities system was dropped, the team brainstormed more types for diversity. Flying makes sense because the Internal Index indicates that early Pokemon had a lot of birds, and they may have decided that these birds should have an advantage against Fighting moves, which after all were just better than your average 'mon. We do know that Flying type was originally designed to just apply to moves that birds could use: all Flying moves are things that Birds could do, like Peck or Wing Attack (even Mirror Move is “Parrot Mimicry in Japanese), while moves like Gust aren’t Flying type, even though they are definitely wind elemental. We have evidence (the unused Bird type in the data) that at some point the team tried to split Flying into Bird and something else (maybe a Wind type?) but for whatever reason they didn’t go through with it. It could be that they didn't think of a convincing difference between the affinities a Wind type would have and a Bird type would have, or maybe they ran out of time, or maybe they thought it was unnecessary. Most likely, they probably figured there were any Pokemon in Generation I that were fit to have a Wind type: the only Pokemon with Flying types that aren't explicitly birds are Aerodactyl, Dragonite, Gyarados, and Butterfree. And of all of them, if Flying type had been split into Bird and something else, I think all of them would have just lost the Flying type anyway. Ground also makes sense as a new type, as Ground is traditional the fourth Greek element after Fire, Water, and Wind (Electric, or early Flying). It is strange that Ground is a physical type, given that the other three elements were Special moves. It could be that the team envisioned two of the elements--Flying and Ground--as physical and the other two--Water and Fire--as elemental, to create symmetry. It could also be the case that the team was consciously trying to move away from the idea that all physical attacks would be Normal: it was probably strange to use the Defense stat to guard against all physical attacks, but have none of the physical attacks be more or less effective against each Pokemon. By dividing physical attacks into Flying, Fighting, Ground, and Poison attacks, the rock/paper/scissors gameplay they'd already developed with the Fire/Water/Electric triad so effectively could be broadened to cover even more of the battle system's gameplay. Poison type, then, was probably intended to be another way of interacting physically with other Pokemon. My guess is that if Fighting moves were supposed to be brute strength and Flying moves were meant to be used by Birds, then maybe Poison moves were meant to be weaker moves that fought with status ailments (ie, Poison) to provide a different way to physically fight the opposing Pokemon. Poison might be a weaker type, but because it could poison your enemy, it's attacks would add up over time. It is notable that Poison and Flying both interact as a different type of counter to Fighting moves (Poison resists Fighting, Flying is super effective) so they may have been made to balance out how good Fighting type was at that early stage and to make Fighting less of a "Normal, just better" typing. Fighting also had no interaction at all with Fire, Water, or Electric at all, so when the team brainstormed new types, one of the priorities may have been to make Fighting work differently against different opponents. I also wonder if Ground or Poison may have initially associated with death, given how these elements are commonly related to undead creatures in other Japanese games (see Lich and Scarmiglione from the Final Fantasy series). No real evidence either way, but I do wonder, especially since Ground was used as a placeholder for Ghost moves when they were eventually created. My hunch is that Flying, Poison, and Ground, were the seventh, eighth, and ninth types to be created (Grass was sixth, as I'll speak about below). Flying, Poison, and Ground all appear in that order in the internal type index, right after Normal and Fighting. I think they were probably created to make more physical types for Pokemon to use. It's also possible that Flying was created first, as a direct counter to Fighting moves, and then Grass, Ground, and Poison were created to form a secondary elemental triad to contrast with Fire/Water/Electric. One slight mystery is that Grass appears before Electric in the internal index of types, suggesting it was created earlier. What probably happened here was that Grass may have been created immediately after the only Fire/Water/Electric stats system was dropped, and it was just programmed in before Electric when they programmed the new system (this also means it may have come before the above physical types). Whatever the case, it is pretty certain that Grass was not initially seen as one of the types in the main elemental triad of the games until very late in development. As late as the final stages of development, the team was still devising new Pokemon as Fire/Water/Electric counterparts: The Goldeen Family, Ponyta Family, and Kotora Family were created as three stage Fire/Water/Electric counterparts as late as a year (I'm guesstimating) before release. There are no Fire/Water/Grass counterpart trios in the internal index (the Bulbasaur family was even created separately from the Charmander and Squirtle families), and the last Pokemon to be added into the Index--the Bellsprout and Oddish families--were probably added in after the fact because once Bulbasaur was made central to the games the roster needed early Grass types available for players that chose the other starters. In fact, FlowersBloom has speculated that the Pikachu/Raichu/Gorochu family may have been, at some point, considered to be the third starter, before the team finally let go of the Fire/Water/Electric trio and turned it into a Fire/Water/Grass triad. The tenth type created was, then, Psychic. I don't have a lot to say about it, except that the team may have wanted a special type which was explicitly not a traditional element. Psychic abilities are common in Japanese anime and video games, so it's not a reach that they came up with it. It's also possible that the team wanted a Special counter to the Fighting type; if that's the case, they definitely overreacted to how good it was in early builds, because all at the same time, they created three types (Poison, Flying, and Psychic) that were good against it. My guess is that these ten types existed through the majority of development. Not only is ten a nice round number, but as Trip in my comments section noted, the original eight gyms, plus the Fighting Dojo, just happen to cover all these types: Giovanni, in early builds, was a flying type gym leader (you can still see it in the feather shaped badge he gives you) and Brock was very likely originally a Ground type trainer, since Onix and Geodude are Ground type as well (and he originally had a Diglett, not a Geodude, in early builds). Discounting Normal (which the team probably still considered "non-elemental" or "typeless" until Generation II), that means that the gyms, in order, covered Ground, Water, Electric, Grass, Poison, (Fighting), Psychic, Fire, and Flying. Ice type was next. At some point down the line, the team decided to split up some of the types, probably to make the game more diverse, and it appears that Ice was their first experiment with this. The game always had Ice Pokemon, of course: Articuno, for instance, existed very early in the roster. But I think the team's early understanding of Water type was that it included both Pokemon that swam in the sea and Pokemon with Ice powers. Some of the early elemental triads in the Internal Index featured a Fire/Ice/Electric trio (Magmar, Buu or Jynx, and Electabuzz, for instance) while others featured a Fire/Water/Electric trio (Flareon, Jolteon, Vaporeon), seemingly arbitrarily. Furthermore, see the early move set for the Squirtle family. Squirtle's original evolution only learned one ultimate attack, Blizzard, even though it wasn't an Ice type. It was probably the case that Blizzard was, at some point, considered the ultimate water move. It's also notable that Water doesn't have a status condition associated with it, while the two other types in the original triad, do: Fire can Burn, and Electric can paralyze. If Freeze was originally associated with Water type, then this would make more sense. Anyway, it appears that the team decided at some point to separate out Ice Pokemon from the Water type, though they left almost all of them with a secondary Water-type anyway (probably because they had tested them as Water-type, and removing the water-type entirely might unbalance the game). In the early move data we have, it even appears that the team was in the middle of separating the Ice type moves from the Water types. of the four Ice type moves in the final game, Blizzard and Ice Beam were Ice type in this early data, but Aurora Beam and Mist were Water-type and Normal, respectively. It's also very notable that even in the final games, Ice only has four moves, and one of them is Mist, which doesn't do anything Ice-related. This seems to pretty clearly indicate that Ice-type wasn't very developed, probably because moves weren't created for it, but moves were simply repurposed from Water. Ground-type also only has three moves: Dig, Bone Club (exclusive to Cubone and Marowak), and Earthquake. All three of them also do the same thing, effectively: Dig and Earthquake have 100 power, though Dig takes two turns to use (but you're invulnerable for one turn, so you only get hit once by the opponent). Bone Club is fifty power, but it hits twice, for an effective power of 100. This is suspicious on its own, but it's made stranger because Rock-type only has two moves: Rock Throw and Rock Slide. In the early moveset data, Rock Throw was a Ground move that functioned as a weaker version of Earthquake, while Rock Slide was originally a move called Star Freeze, a signature move of Staryu (it has a weird sound and animation in the final game, implying that this animation was left over from its days as Star Freeze). Thus, Rock-type moves don't exist in this early data. This makes it very clear that Rock was split from Ground at a point late in development. Not only does this help us understand why Ground has such little move diversity, it also makes sense of the way that nearly every Rock-type Pokemon in the final game was also Ground-type. Why split this two apart from each other? Who knows. Maybe they thought that throwing a Rock should be able to hit a bird, even though Flying types were immune to Ground moves (though, confusingly, Rock Throw was initially named Rock Slide (and that name was used to replace Star Freeze), so it wasn't throwing anything at all). My guess is that the team wanted to make the first gym resist Normal type moves, to teach the player to collect many different types of Pokemon to overcome their first challenge. Thus, they created a new Rock-type specifically to be an obstacle for the player, and in doing so created a nice tutorial for the player. Likewise, if Brock had been a Ground-type trainer, his team would have been more of pushovers than they already are: they wouldn't resist any of the starter Pokemon's moves. That explanation isn't for certain at all, but that's the only guess I got. It's about this time, by the way, that they also tried to split Bird from Flying. So types eleven, twelve, and the abandoned thirteenth type all share that they were created very late, that they were underdeveloped, and that they were split from other more developed types. Ignoring Bird for a second, Ice and Rock also share the feature that there are no single type Ice or Rock types at all, and that the vast majority of these Pokemon share a typing with the type Rock or Ice originally split from. The final three types--Bug, Dragon, and Ghost--also share a lot of these characteristics. All the moves that are Bug-type or Ghost-type in the final do not have their final types in the early move data: Bug moves are Normal, Ghost moves are Ground as a placeholder. Dragon Rage does exist, and is Dragon type, implying it was created as the earliest of these three. But there's only one Dragon move, and it does fixed Damage, so its effectiveness never comes into play. Likewise, of the three Ghost-type moves, only Lick does Ghost-type damage, and it's such a weak move most players don't even notice this. There is only one Ghost family, and one Dragon family, and while there are a lot more Bug families in the game, the Bug moves they have are very limited and all extremely weak. All three types look incredibly unfinished compared to the other types. I'm very certain that all three were created to fit particular game play roles. Dragon was probably created first, as a boss type, usable by Lance to give the player a big challenge. Notably, Dragon type resists all three of the starter elements (and Electric) which means that the Pokemon you began with has difficulty overcoming them: the intent seems to be that to defeat Lance, the player would have had to have branched out on their journey and caught more advanced Pokemon with more advanced types. Dratini is only caught by fishing, which tells me that it was likely a Water-type originally (it's the only non-water type caught by fishing), and thus Dragonair and Dragonite were probably Water and Water/Flying, respectively. But that wouldn't have been much of a challenge to a player with Venusaur! So, to make Lance a challenge, they lost that initial type. Bug was probably created next, though the various bugs in the game had probably existed for a long time: Caterpie was probably Grass or Normal, Weedle was Poison, I'm suspicious that Venonat was originally Psychic (but more likely Poison), Paras was originally Grass, and Scyther and Pinsir were probably Flying and Fighting respectively. The team probably created the Bug-type to thematically unite all these Pokemon, and to create an early game type that wasn't very good (so the player could steamroll them) but would evolve really early, so that the player could learn about evolution in the tutorial stages of the game. Bug Pokemon would teach the player that even the weakest things they encounter could have a secret hidden inside, and by evolving a Caterpie early, a player might be able to get past Brock even though their Charmander isn't up for the task. The Ghost type seems to have been the very last type created, and it's pretty obvious to me that they were all originally pure Poison-types. The story made a big deal of the Pokemon Tower as filled with special Pokemon, and initially you couldn't catch them without the Silph Scope. I think the team realized that they wanted something to make these Pokemon feel special, or a little different than the other Pokemon, given how hard it was to catch them initially. Poison type Pokemon wouldn't create that feeling of distinctiveness, so Ghost was created to set them apart. There's also a little evidence (like the anime) that they created the Ghost-type to help you defeat Sabrina. However, if the team intended for Ghosts to help you, then they screwed up: not only did they accidentally mess up the type chart and make Psychic-types immune to Ghost types, but they didn't give Ghosts a powerful enough damage dealing attack to be a threat to Psychic-types. Lick was too weak even if it could damage them, and Night Shade only deals set damage. Both of these seemingly obvious mistakes could be, however, a symptom of how late Ghost was created. One more hint of Ghost's late addition is Agatha's early team. By the data we have, Lorelei, Bruno, and Lance all have teams that match their final type: Agatha does not. In the earliest data we have, she has a team consisting of a Tangela, a Jolteon, a Flareon, and a Vaporeon. This team, of course, gives her one high leveled, rare, Pokemon of each of the four basic elements. In slightly later data, she has a Flareon, a Jolteon, and a Tauros instead. In either case, it seems pretty clear they didn't have an idea for her typing, which would have been obvious if Ghost-type already existed. Thus, the only logical explanation is that Ghost was added after all the other types, so late that there was a time when Agatha didn't even have any! Anyway, so that's my take on how types were invented. There were essentially three stages: The Fire/Water/Electric/Normal/Fighting stage of development, the second stage where Flying, Grass, Poison, Ground, and Psychic were developed, and the final stage where Ice, Rock, Dragon, Bug and then Ghost were created. I hope you found this analysis interesting! Let me know if you have any ideas to add!
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