ID 353: ???Our next early Pokemon design is another one that didn’t make it to the final. ID 353 is a very rough design, so this should come as no surprise. 353 clearly needed a couple more drafts: it's another good example of how the Pokemon from Period 1e were discarded early without much work on them. While there’s not much to say about this guy personally, he is an interesting window into the question of authorship, and the relationship between Periods 1e, 1a, and 1b. First, let’s take a look at this ‘mon. He’s a bit of a mix of a lot of things. On first glance, he struck me as a gargoyle, a European mythological creature usually made to look grotesque and monstrous and carved out of stone on churches and cathedrals. In particular, 353's head resembles a gargoyle. He might also have been based on some sort of prehistoric creature, maybe the archaeopteryx or a dinosaur of some type. @Orangefrench has speculated that ID 353 might have been discarded because of its resemblance to Aerodactyl, which I can definitely see here. Certainly, the two have a lot of similarities and probably would have had similar movesets. In fact, now that I look at them next to each other, I can't help but notice how suspiciously similar their noses are. Maybe ID 353 was supposed to be a pre-evolution of Aerodactyl? Interesting to me is that while 353 looks like a gargoyle superficially, remove the head and those similarities almost completely end. Instead, it has a lot of strange features that don't seem to match up to anything. Notice how it doesn't have any hands (maybe there's a hint of a claw next to its thigh but it's hard to tell). Hands are an odd omission given that most animal-like Pokemon designs at least gesture towards having hands. Instead of arms, 353 has gigantic feet, and is in a crouch that makes me think it’s about ready to pounce. This gives me a bit of a “kangaroo” impression from 353, though none of the rest of it goes with that theme. Altogether, I could potentially see it hopping around caves and ambushing trainers. Again, as I look more at these sprites, I notice that Aerodactyl's hands are also very undeveloped, and that the "thighs" I see on 353 could be folded in wings with claws at the end. I'm still unsure what to make of these similarities. Also notice the shape of its body: it’s shaped oddly, a bit like a potato with limbs attached. There’s not any thought given to the anatomy of the body, except that it’s a place to attach limbs to. More than that, notice how badly proportioned the tail is. It gets wider in the middle, almost like the sprite is trying to mimic perspective, but then everything else on the tail puts it equally in the foreground. Thus, the tail looks weirdly fatter in the center. Beyond how rough it is, 353 also is neat because it has some tell-tale characteristics to its spritework that resemble a number other rejected Gold/Silver sprites, especially from Period 1b. In particular, note the particular way 353’s eye is drawn, and then compare it to the following: It’s a little hard to see, given that I’ve blown up the pixels so much, but look at how the eyes are drawn in each of these Pokemon, especially the first four. Look how the designer used almost the same shading for each, and how they’re all angled the same way. Some are close enough that you could transplant them to the other designs and they would still fit. At least the first four are unmistakably made by the same person. The last three I initially thought were the same artist as well, but when blown up have significant differences: you decide if the similarities are enough to convince you of a similar authorship. Following these clues, we potentially know that the author of Period 1a—and at least parts of 1b—was the same author as the one who made Period 1e. While I’ve stated in the past that I thought Morimoto was the main designer for these, and he may well be, the sheer amount of Pokemon from these periods that didn’t even make it into Spaceworld ’97 makes me wonder whether they were made by some other designer beyond the four names we are most familiar with (Fujiwara, Morimoto, Nishida and Sugimori). We know that Game Freak hired more sprite artists to assist with the redrawn sprites of Pokemon Blue and Yellow, and that there were two more sprite artists assisting on Gold and Silver, so maybe these unused designs were their attempts at original creatures? It's hard to know what this revelation tells us, or how significant it is to know the designers of Periods 1a, 1b, and 1e might be the same. But it is interesting that all of these Pokemon with similar eyes never made it into the final game, and so whoever this designer was, they seem to have had an abysmal track record for creating enduring Pokemon designs. It's just one more piece of the puzzle for us to keep in our back pocket as we keep deciphering the Korean Index. ID 354: Manbo1Manbo1’s a cute Sunfish guy, with a bit of spikes on his back to differentiate him slightly from the real world animal. His name, clearly a placeholder, simply means “Sunfish 1”. On the face of it, Manbo1’s a simple dude with a simple design. Sunfish are normally huge, which made it a mystery why Manbo1 was a seemingly small first evolution when it was originally uncovered in the Spaceworld '97 leak. As it turns out, the Korean Index answered our question: he was originally the first in an evolutionary family of Sunfish, the latter two looking big and majestic, as befitting a sunfish. (Colorized sprites are speculative, and created by @OrangeFrench) Under the hood, Manbo1’s deceptively interesting. The most significant trait of Manbo1 is that it was the only Pokemon in Period 1e to make it to Spaceworld ’97. Even though it has two apparent evolutions, Manbo1 somehow was connected to a completely different evolutionary family, composed of Ikari and Gurotesu, two Water/Steel Pokemon that look entirely different from Manbo1 itself. How did this happen? What made Manbo1 special? From his name, it’s clear that Manbo1 either wasn’t worked on much and/or was added last minute to Spaceworld ’97. The name is clearly a stand-in: Manbo1 is just a description of the type of animal he’s based on with a number at the end. In interviews, Sugimori said that their placeholder names usually follow this format: They take an animal name and affix a number to it which designates the evolutionary stage it is. Thus, since Manbo1’s the earliest stage in a Sunfish-inspired evolutionary line. We can reasonably infer from this that the two follow up stages were never named anything more original than Manbo2 and Manbo3. When Spaceworld ’97 leaked, Manbo1’s name was latched onto as particularly strange, given the number, and there was some discussion of whether the number was a typo or whether it meant something more. When the Korean Index leaked, of course, we found out the answer: that it was linked to a completely different, Sunfish centric family. All of a sudden, that “1” at the end of its name made sense! It’s very likely the case that the other unused Pokemon in the Korean Index also had placeholder names like this, especially in Periods 1a, 1b, and 1e. If Manbo1, which has an arguably well-polished sprite, still had a placeholder name, it could have been that only Pokemon which made it to Spaceworld ’97 were ever considered for a more interesting name. As much as we like to look at the Korean Index and speculate about what each Pokemon was designed to do, this could just be an indication that most of them were only lightly designed and didn’t have names to speak of unless they spent some time in one of the later builds of the game. Maybe the gargoyle didn't really have anything thought up about it except for its sprite, for instance. Funny enough, there's one more Pokemon in Spaceworld '97 to have this placeholder style name, but we never noticed: Porygon2! Of course, no one saw this as suspicious, because Porygon's computer theme made a name with a number in it make sense, even made it flavorful. It's unclear whether this was always meant to be Porygon2's final name, or whether it was still a placeholder name by Spaceworld '97, but the designers later decided they liked it and stuck with it. Other than Porygon2, however, Manbo1's the only Pokemon in Spaceworld '97 with an obvious placeholder name like this. This is odd: most Pokemon in Spaceworld ’97 are more or less complete, with a few exceptions, and it's strange that Manbo1 didn't have a finished name while everything else did. It would make sense, however, if Manbo1 was a late addition to Spaceworld ’97: if it was added right before the build was finished to fill a niche, Game Freak might not had time to give it something more interesting. Or, following this logic even more, Game Freak could have always considered Manbo1 a placeholder Pokemon, and knew it wasn't likely to make it to the final, so never bothered being more creative with it. If it was a late addition, then it probably filled a slot already occupied by something else: the other Pokemon which were added late to the game (Snubbull, Togepi, Sneasel, Leafeon) were all added to the very end of the Pokedex, while Manbo1 was added in the middle, alongside its adopted evolutionary relatives Ikari and Gurotesu. This makes me think that Manbo1 was pulled in to solve a problem with the other two: probably to help them make sense as an evolutionary line. The Korean Index has a pre-evolution for Gurotesu in it, and I wonder if it was originally in Manbo1’s place before Ikari was made into an evolutionary relative of Gurotesu. It could easily have been the case that when they decided to mash Ikari and Gurotesu together into evolutionary relatives, the pre-Gurotesu looked so little like Ikari that the designers looked elsewhere for a design that fit better. Fish to shark to eel makes more sense, after all, than eel to shark to eel. I noted in ID 353's entry that 353 provided us evidence that Periods 1e and 1a were made by the same person. If I'm correct, then that designer was may have recruited Manbo1 to replace their pre-Gurotesu, since they'd most likely choose another Pokemon that they made to replace the deleted design. This would explain would explain why Manbo1 seems to be the only Pokemon from this Period to make it to SW ’97: This creator pulled it in to work with the few other original creations they had made that made it to Spaceworld '97. Furthermore, the experiment to make all of these Pokemon into one evolutionary line could have always been tentative, as well, which is why Manbo1’s name was never modified. When discussing Ikari previously, I already discussed the movesets of these three, but it’s worth discussing a little more here. As previously stated, Manbo1’s moveset doesn’t fit this chill fishy guy at all: Manbo1 learns Rage, Scary Face, Thrash, and Iron Tail, none of which make much sense. After all, Manbo1 has a kind of cute face not a scary one, it doesn’t have much of a tail to whack anything with--much less a metal one-- and it certainly doesn’t look angry like Rage or Thrash would imply. While some of these moves might be designed with its evolutionary relatives in mind (Ikari literally means Rage), Rage is learned by Manbo1 at level ten, before it evolves; why would it learn such a move while it's still cute and cuddly? Furthermore, while some of these moves—namely Scary Face and Iron Tail—do seem plausible for the third stage, Gurotesu, others do not. I said in the previous article that it was clear Game Freak was having problems finding any moves that fit all three, but it could also be the case that they didn’t even try, and that this moveset is simply the moveset they had already developed for Ikari, copy-pasted onto the two other Pokemon when they gave it evolutionary relatives. Given how tentative it seems Manbo1’s inclusion was, and how it was from a run of Pokemon in the Index that were otherwise never really considered, its no surprise that Manbo1 didn’t make it much farther than Spaceworld ’97. Gurotesu’s sprite was reworked a bit and made it as far as the June 1999 build, but Ikari seems to have been overwritten by Heracross before June 1999, and Manbo1 was overwritten by Yanma. Interestingly, it appears that Game Freak tried a couple more permutations of this evolutionary line before scrapping Manbo1. In Spaceworld ’97, Manbo1 was Pokedex #180, Ikari was #181, and Gurotesu was #182, but they appear to have been shuffled around by June 1999. At that point, Yanma was #170, Gurotesu was #171, and Heracross was #214. Yanma and Gurotesu both have placeholder stats at this point, and Gurotesu’s name is now Pending 03, but Yanma evolves into it at level ten. We know from the Scratchpads that Yanma overwrote Manbo and Heracross Ikari, so the best explanation for why they are in these slots now is that, previous to their deletion, Ikari was moved out of the evolutionary family and Gurotesu was brought closer to Manbo1. The evolution data from Yanma to Gurotesu indicates that for awhile Gurotesu was being replaced by a Yanma evolution, but it might also be a leftover from when Manbo evolved directly into Gurotesu. What I’m saying is that there is likely another intermediate build, probably made in mid to late 1998, in which Manbo1 and Gurotesu formed a two stage evolution (probably with their own moveset and potentially without the Steel typing), and Ikari was an independent one stage evolution (much like Sharpedo in Generation III). It appears that this evolutionary family went through a lot of experiments and changes that we aren’t privy to given the lack of a build earlier than Spaceworld 97 or between SW97 and June 1999. These three Pokemon seem to have been in flux all the way until their deletion, which makes perfect sense given how little they made sense as part of an evolutionary family. ID 355: Manbo2ID 355 is the presumed original evolution to Manbo1. While we don’t have a name confirmed, I feel pretty safe in calling is Manbo2, given the naming scheme Game Freak used for placeholder sprites. Unlike his more docile predecessor, Manbo2’s got a spooked look on its face and horns on its head instead of a cute tuft of fur. It definitely looks like a more buff version of Manbo1, and it certainly has more resemblance and makes more sense than Ikari as an evolutionary relative. Why three Sunfish Pokemon that look very similar? It seems like Sunfish were pretty popular in Japanese media in the 1990s. For instance, Kirby 2 gave Kirby a Sunfish animal friend named Kine, and a shoot-em-up only released in Japan named Gokujo Parodius had two Sunfish characters, named Samba and Mambo: However, maybe three Sunfish Pokemon, which all looked pretty similar, was too much for Game Freak. Most Pokemon don’t just grow larger as they evolve, but they develop some sort of gimmick. Generation I has examples like Muk and Rapidash that are more or less just larger versions of their evolutionary predecessors, of course, but the vast majority--Exeggcute, Weezing, Arcanine, Kadabra, Cloyster, etc--change enough of their design to be a distinct play on the concept when they evolve. In Generation II there seems to have been a general move to make evolutions even more distinctive. Kotora and Raitora look a bit similar, but they were holdovers from Generation I, and the rest of the evolutions in Spaceworld ’97--Kyonpan, Kingdra, Crobat, Octillery, Jumpluf, Bellossom—all make an effort to put a spin on the create they came from. In this context, Manbo2 might have been the wrong design direction. While Manbo1’s sprite was pretty much finished and polished (as is Manbo3’s), Manbo2 shows some pretty obvious signs that it wasn’t complete. I’m mostly pointing at Manbo2’s clearly unfinished tailfin. While its back sprite shows us a properly shaded and thought-out fin, on the front sprite its just a grey blob. No shading or anything; it’s just clearly unfinished. I don’t think any other sprite in the Korean Index has an obviously unfinished piece like that (though of course the Natu 2nd stage is missing a wing). In addition to that, there are some slight discrepancies between the front and backsprites, showing that Manbo2 hadn’t been worked on enough to work out these sorts of rough edges. It's also worth doing another eye analysis here. Manbo2’s eyes are by far its most distinctive feature, making it look like its worried or staring deeply into your soul. Its eyes, however, are interesting because they’re the exact same design as ID 351, and look similar to some of the eyes from Pokemon in the original Gen I sprites. Take a look: The first two have got to have been made by the same person, furthering the possibility that most or all of Period 1e was created by the same unknown designer. The other two have enough differences that I can’t be sure, but they do seem to be the same overall design. I don’t have too much to draw from these observations this time around, except to reinterate the ways that the unused designs in Period 1e seem to have connections to each other, and thus as well to the unused designs of Periods 1a and 1b. Other than these in-depth looks at the sprite art for Manbo2, there’s not to much else to say about it. It’s certainly a more developed Manbo1, and it continues to look like a cool Sunfish. While I am sure that Manbo2 wouldn’t have been hated had it made it to the final game, I also can’t imagine it being well remembered or a favorite of just about anyone. Game Freak was probably right to cut Manbo1 from the rest of the evolutionary family, as you get everything good about the design with Manbo1 and you don’t have to waste three Pokedex slots on the same idea. ID 356: Manbo3This guy looks mean! To finish off the Manbo family, we’ve got a much bigger third evolution, complete with horns and eyes full of judgement. This Manbo is the one that looks the most like a Sunfish: its back fins resemble the backs of an actual sunfish, and it’s proportions are closer to a real one. Manbo3 is probably my favorite design out of the Manbo family. Not only does it look pretty cool, but I really like the horns on its head. Sure, in many ways this is just Seel redux, but given that Sunfish tend to be gentle giants, I think it’s a cool idea to cross one with a Rhinoceros and make it a predator. The eyes on Manbo3 look different from just about every other Pokemon (especially Generation II), suggesting again that this was worked on by someone other than the four main designers of Generation I, but I think the eyes really work. Together, all three Manbos make an coherent family that grows upon the themes of the previous ones: While Manbo1 didn’t seem like the sort of Pokemon to learn Rage and Thrash, those moves would feel perfectly at home wielded by Manbo3. I don’t think this is any indication that Manbo3 was ever in any of the builds of the game (at least not for long), but it is interesting to me that Manbo1’s moveset might not quite be as out-of-nowhere as it looks when you only see the smallest member of the family. Who would know, for instance, that under Dratini’s cute demeanor was the potential for “Outrage”? The biggest problem with the Manbo family is that they still fit into that generic “Animal+” design space that permeated Generation I’s less popular creatures. No matter how coherent the Manbo line is, or how well they build off of each other, at the end of the day they’re still just fish with horns on their head. Given that Game Freak had choices like Remoraid or Qwilfish that would fill the same design space and the Manbos, and take up less Pokedex slots, it’s no wonder why the Manbo line was shortened and then eventually deleted entirely. Even if we ignore its Animal+ design as a reason to discount it, what really does Manbo3 give Pokemon that Seaking already didn’t? Both are large imposing fish that evolve from an innocuous first form, both have spikes on their head and would probably learn “Horn Attack”, and both would be caught on fishing rods in the same routes. Generation I had Magikarp and Goldeen—what it really needed were water Pokemon that didn’t fit that fishy profile. I could see how other designs would stand out much more than the Manbos. In the end, Game Freak eventually did go back to this original idea and introduce a Sunfish-inspired Pokemon. In Generation V, they introduced Alomomola: There’s a lot of differences between the two designs: Alomomola has much more of a defensive healer vibe to it and to its moves, while Manbo3 looks ready to stab someone. Furthermore, the time between the creation of Manbo3 and Alomomola was way too long for Alomomola to be a rework of the Manbos. Still, Sunfish are really cool fish, and they are a naturally good idea for a Pokemon. I’m glad the concept finally found a home, even if it no longer has those cool horns and the judgey face. Era One Wrap UpThis first section of the Korean Index, which I’ve dubbed “Era One,” probably constitutes the creations made during 1996, before Game Freak ever had much of a working prototype or even much of a roster on their hands. When Tajiri was asked about the new games in Corocoro in 1996, he said that we could expect to have “over 200” Pokemon in the games—less than the 250 number the team used frequently after 1996. This seems to imply that by 1996, Game Freak probably only had a roster of around 200, very rough, Pokemon. Which is almost exactly the number in the Korean Index by the time we end Period 1e. Whatever they had by this point was probably barebones and mainly for testing, despite that we know they already had a title screen with Ho-oh on it. New Generation II moves were either not developed yet, or developed at the very end of this era of Gold and Silver’s development, probably around Period 1d when Smeargle was created. It’s hard to say whether all of these designs were at one point implemented into the game or not, but some of them certainly were probably only considered placeholders until they had better ideas. Major Themes of Era One |
AuthorMy name's Aaron George, and I'm both a historian and a fan of Pokemon, especially of development. Reach me at @Asmoranomardic ArchivesCategories |