5/10/2023 5 Comments ID 427 (Animon) to ID 431 (Pudi)ID 427: AnimonAnimon’s one of my favorite Pokemon found in the Spaceworld ’97 build. I love the goofy looking scream on its face, the cute yet fierce nature in its eyes, and I adore the idea of giving Ditto an evolution. With the spotty data we have from the Generation II leaks, Animon’s a bit of a mystery; saying that, I think we have enough evidence to be pretty confident in what Animon was supposed to do. (Art by @RacieBeep) We know that Animon was designed as an evolution for Ditto, because Spaceworld ’97 has evolution data which says that Ditto evolves when holding the Metal Coat and being traded. This is notably the same evolutionary method that Steelix, Scizor, and Plux were eventually given (all Pokemon that become Steel after evolving. Keep this on the backburner for now). Beyond that though, Animon is an odd Pokemon, because in all other ways it looks identical to Ditto. It’s Normal type, just like Ditto, and all it learns is Transform, just like Ditto. Its stats are all placeholders, so we don’t know if it would have gotten buffed in that regard, but raising Ditto’s stats is a weird endeavor. It doesn't really matter what Ditto's stats are, because it loses all of those stats the second it transforms. The whole puzzle of Animon raises a larger question: What could an evolution for Ditto even look like? Evolution, as a concept, is supposed to take a weaker Pokemon and make it stronger in some way, usually through stat improvements. But Ditto doesn’t grow stronger through gaining stats (except for HP). I’m sure the team at Game Freak were a bit puzzled by this problem as well. Ditto was a pretty iconic Pokemon from the first generation, and most of Era III was focused on expanding the lines of previously created Pokemon, so Ditto is an obvious candidate for an evolution. But while that strategy paid dividends with Steelix or Blissey, how is that formula supposed to work here? The key, I think, is that Ditto has a debilitating weakness, one which I’m sure the designers were aware of. Because Ditto needs to waste a turn to transform, that means that Ditto will always take one hit from its opponent before it can attack, essentially meaning that it will lose any mirror match. Given that Ditto’s whole gimmick was that it directly mirrored the power of its opponent, this was a pretty crippling Achilles' heel: if Ditto couldn’t even beat the Pokemon it transformed into, what even was the point of Ditto? Maybe an evolution for Ditto could solve this weakness? In Generation V, the designers solved this problem by given Ditto the ability “Imposter.” Imposter automatically transforms Ditto the turn it is swapped into a battle; that guarantees that Ditto will be able to fight its opponent on a level playing field. Unfortunately, Generation II didn’t have Pokemon Abilities, so a solution like this wouldn’t have worked. But maybe the team were thinking along these lines when they came up with Animon. There are a number of examples in Era III of Pokemon that aren’t quite finished. Obviously, whatever was planned for Taaban was never programmed into Spaceworld ’97. On top of that, all the Pokemon that evolve by evolutionary stone hadn’t yet had those stone evolutions programmed in (like Tsubomitto), and the Hitmon line’s evolution was still just a placeholder (remember that they all evolve from Tyrogue at the exact same time, and the only way to get a different Hitmon was to cancel the first evolution and wait for it to immediately evolve again). The reason I bring this up is to suggest that Animon was possibly also unfinished. While its evolutionary method is complete in Spaceworld '97, I think there was more going on here that the team just hadn’t yet had a chance to program. My theory is that the team was trying to come up with a way for Animon to transform into an improved version of the opponent's Pokemon. In particular, the way it evolves is suspicious: why use the Metal Coat, when that item was used for other Pokemon as a way to give them the Steel type after evolving? I think Animon was intended to replace the opponent’s type with the Steel type (Metal type, in this build) when it evolved. Maybe Animon was going to be Steel-type itself, and I’m not sure if it would have just replaced the primary type, the secondary type, or just add Steel type to whatever Pokemon it transformed to. But I’m relatively certain, given its design and its evolutionary method, that the intent was that Animon made metallic versions of the enemy Pokemon it copied. In this way, it would make better versions of the transformed Pokemon: because “Metal type” was envisioned as a primarily defensive type, it would usually mean that Animon was better equipped to handle the mirror match it created. It wouldn’t just replicate its opponents: it would make them stronger! Viewed with this theory in mind, Animon’s strange appearance begins to make more sense. It’s not just a weird looking Ditto: Animon’s a collection of iron filings, magnetized towards a metallic source. It’s pointy because that’s the direction that the iron filings are attracted to. The reason it gets magnetized like this is because, during the trade, Ditto fuses with the metal coat, becoming not only a blob but a metallic blob. Importantly, one thing to keep in mind is that in Spaceworld '97, Ditto is the only Pokemon to evolve with the Metal Coat; Onix still evolves by level. Which means that Metal Coat hadn't yet been fleshed out as an evolutionary method for Steel Pokemon. This weakens my case, admittedly, but it could have worked the other way around: even after Animon was cut from the games, the designers decided to use the one thing that worked from Animon and explicitly connect it to other Steel-type evolutions, like Steelix, Scizor, and Plux. Each of these Pokemon only gains the Steel type through a trade while holding the Metal Coat, and each of their designs are based on the idea that their previous evolution somehow became coated in metal during the trade process. The problem with this whole idea for Animon was, I’m sure, in the execution. How, exactly, would Animon keep its Steel-type when transforming? The easiest answer to this question was probably to create a “Transform+” sort of skill to give to Animon when it evolved, but then it’d have Transform as well (since Ditto learned it), which would feel awkward, and potentially create bad gameplay situations if the player accidentally used the wrong type of Transform. On top of that, Transform has always been infamously buggy; if you don’t believe me, try using Select to swap two moves after your Ditto transformed in Generation I. I’m sure there was some complication with the programming that involved swapping types during Transform. Maybe the team could have hard-coded Transform to preserve Animon’s type if it was Steel, but that seems like a worse solution that would have all the same problems as creating a new move to do it. If this really was the plan, my bet is that the team hadn’t decided on the best solution to this problem by the time Spaceworld ’97 was finished. On top of that, retaining the Steel-type came with its own problems. If Steel replaced the primary type of the copied Pokemon, Animon may not have the same-type bonus to the attacks it mimicked. It’d feel pretty bad for Animon to be worse at attacking than its counterpart. And even though Steel was a defensive-type, that didn’t mean it didn’t have weaknesses: it would really feel bad for Animon to transform into a Fire Pokemon, only to gain a weakness to the very fire moves its opponent used. These cases might have made the team unsure if Animon was even worth all the trouble to program: if the gameplay of retaining Steel-type didn’t feel good in the first place, what was the point? Amidst all of this, I think the team found a better solution that made the existence of Animon obsolete. Soon after the Spaceworld ’97 demo was created, Game Freak came up with a unique held item for Ditto: Metal Powder. Metal Powder, if held by a Ditto, increases its Defense and its Special Defense by 50%, even while transformed (only in Generation II). Effectively, this item solved the Ditto problem mentioned above in a simple and elegant way: yes, Ditto would always take one hit while transforming, but it’d have higher defensive stats than the opponent it copied, so it would still have a fighting chance against that opponent. Metal Powder didn't exist in Spaceworld '97; it only appears in the data after Animon was already removed, suggesting that it could have replaced Animon entirely. And it certainly did exactly what the team needed Animon to do; it even kept the flavor of a metallic Ditto intact! With this item in place, it’s no surprise that Animon disappeared from the roster by the time the team rebooted the game in 1999. Animon’s slot was replaced with Gligar, a unique Pokemon in its own right, and one that probably did a lot more for the diversity of Generation II than Animon ever could have. I get it. I love Animon, he’s one of my favorites from the Spaceworld ’97 demo. I would give a lot for him to have a place in the Pokemon roster. But I also understand why he was dropped. Animon’s a weirdo, and the problem he was tasked with solving was probably just done much better without the need for an entire evolution. ID 428: Porygon2 Speaking of weirdo Gen I Pokemon, the next Pokemon to get an evolution in Era III was Porygon! Porygon2 is the next generation of Porygon technology: smoother, more efficient, and ready for terraforming other planets (at least according to its final Pokedex entry; the draft is much less interesting and does not mention the colonization of other worlds). At least in its original form, Porygon2 didn't look anything like Porygon; it was a balloon animal lion. It was quite a strange choice. What was going on with this guy? (Art on left is by @RacieB; on the right is Sugimori's official art of Porygon2) Porygon was an odd duck in Generation I. The only way to get one was by paying an exorbitant amount of coins at the Game Corner. It was such a high amount that it could take the player hours of grinding to ever amass the money you needed to buy them (I know, because as a kid I fought the Elite Four over and over so I could eventually claim my Porygon prize). However, when you do get one, it turns out it’s actually pretty bad: Porygon has low stats, unimpressive typing, and though it learns Agility, Hyper Beam, and Recover, is usually overshadowed by Pokemon that are a lot easier to get. In fact, in an interview, Satoshi Tajiri mentioned that Porygon was meant to be nothing more than a throwaway joke: he was told over and over during development that the future was in 3D games, not in Gameboy games, so he created a 3D Pokemon of the future! It’s also probably the case that Porygon’s low stats were part of this joke. After spending all this time saving up for cutting edge technology, it turns out that the bird you caught in the wild was already better and more useful. (The peak of technological innovation!) Given how weak Porygon was, it was a prime candidate to get an evolution. And Porygon2 solves the problem of Porygon's weakness: by adding twenty to every stat, Porygon2 went from a measly 385 BST to an impressive 515 BST. Porygon2 has more or less the same movepool that Porygon did in Generation I (though it lost Hyper Beam). But on a stronger body, these moves hit much harder. If the theory of giving Porygon an evolution was sound, the practice was a little more complicated. The Pokemon team seemed to struggle to come up with a look for Porygon2, because their first attempt at it didn’t look anything at all like the original form. I remember when the Spaceworld ’97 leak first appeared, people didn’t even realize this was supposed to be Porygon2 at first. Instead, it just looks like a balloon lion. However, in retrospect, it’s quite clear what this design was going for. Porygon, of course, was made of angular Polygons. It was supposed to resemble the best that 3D graphics could do at the time, like how most N64 games look blocky and simplistic in their designs. Gaming engines at the time had a particular problem depicting circular objects. Because 3D objects were made by drawing vectors and filling them in to become a polygon, they were always going to be composed of flat sides. Since a sphere doesn’t have a flat side, the only way to make one would be to have an incredibly complicated polygon with an infinite number of incredibly tiny sides. Obviously, that would be difficult for any computer of the time to render. The fundamental concept for Porygon2 was to show the graphics of the future, or what Porygon would look like rendered on a much more powerful machine. What if it were made entirely out of spheres, something that the N64 of the time would have been unable to create? That, I think, is where the idea of this strange lion came from. If Porygon was made out of blocky polygons, Porygon2 was made entirely from spheres. Why a lion? I think the designer set out to create a Pokemon made of spheres first, and a lion became the most obvious animal that would look good made out of spheres. Porygon2’s mane, for instance, works well when made out of spheres, and its feline face works when created out of the same features. I doubt you’d get such an expressive face out of any other animal designs when you’re so limited in the shapes you can use. Speaking of the design, a lot of people have noticed a similarity between SW’97 Porygon2 and a pretty famous mascot for a company called Mr. Donuts in Japan. The mascot, Pon De Lion, admittedly does look almost exactly like Porygon2: However, as interesting as the resemblance is, it’s a total coincidence. Pon De Lion first debuted in 2003, six years after this design was discarded for Gold and Silver. There was an old rumor that the guy who created Panel De Lion, Yuichi Ito, may have worked on Gold and Silver during this period (and thus could have reused his design for Pon De Lion), but no one’s been able to confirm that rumor and its probably just not true. It’s a weird case of synchronicity, but there’s no relationship between the two designs. I think the design team realized that this design was a mistake, however, and by early 1999, they’d already decided to give Porygon2 a design that was much more reminiscent of Porygon. The team probably (correctly) surmised that Liongon was unrecognizable and threw away many of the charming parts of Porygon when it went in such a unique direction. The next version still had the same basic inspiration. Though it took a number of passes to perfect, the design was essentially to imagine what Porygon would look like on more advanced technology that was more adept at creating smooth surfaces. The revised Porygon2 isn’t entirely made of spheres, but it is made up of smooth surfaces, like spheres, that would be difficult for the technology of the time to render, showing off just how futuristic it was. It also heavily resembles the “drinking bird” toy, a popular toy that bobs its head in and out of water, that’s been parodied in a lot of popular culture. I have no idea if this was intentional. Honestly, I’m a little surprised that Porygon2 even made it past Spaceworld ’97. Remember that in 1998, the famous Porygon incident happened in Japan, giving dozens of kids seizures and nearly destroying the franchise before it had really even gotten off the ground. Because of that incident, to this day Porygon is persona non grata on the anime, being completely banned from any appearances. Given that this incident happened right in the middle of Gold and Silver’s hiatus (and maybe was even the cause of the hiatus and subsequent reboot), it seems natural that the team would have dropped Porygon’s evolution alongside the dozen other designs that didn’t make it into the 1999 reboot. It seems to me that Porygon2 must have had a champion on the design team that, say, Norowara did not. Porygon2 always evolved when given the Upgrade Disk item and traded. It isn’t that surprising for it to have a technology based evolution, but as an aside, can I quickly complain about just how many trade evolutions there are in Generation II? Besides Porygon2, Slowking, Steelix, Kingdra, and Scizor all needed to be traded to evolve (Plux and Animon would also have been on this list had they survived until the final game). There were four trade evolutions in Generation I, but at the very least those were four out of 150 new Pokemon to explore; here, some of the most interesting Gen II Pokemon, half the available Steel Pokemon, and the only new Dragon Pokemon were hidden behind an evolutionary method that would have been closed off for vast amounts of gamers. Combine this with how underused Slugma, Murkrow Misdreavus, Larvitar and Houndour were, it very much feels like the designers of Generation II were actively trying to keep the player from experiencing the new designs they’d created. Finally, let’s also address Porygon2’s name. Obviously, the name is a good fit for the Pokemon: Porygon2 feels exactly how you’d name the latest update for your computer. But what is also interesting is that the name follows exactly the format we know that the team used to as placeholders when designing Pokemon. For instance, the Sunfish Pokemon found in Spaceworld ’97 was named Manbo1, which essentially is the name of the species plus a number indicating the evolutionary level it was; the next Pokemon would presumably be named Manbo2 and Manbo3. In interviews, Sugimori has said that this naming scheme was common: before they had a name for the species, they’d often just name it [Type of animal][number in the evolutionary line]. Which, interestingly, exactly matches Porygon2’s name. This could mean nothing, but it could also mean that Porygon2 was originally just a placeholder name that the team decided fit well enough that they kept it. Or, similarly, made its name is a sort of in-joke among the team: by making it look exactly like they’d name placeholders in the index, it’s a joke that Porygon2 was designed as a direct upgrade to Porygon. Like I said, this could mean nothing; I still find it worth noting that the name itself might have some meaning behind it. I’m glad Porygon2 made it into Generation II; I’m not wild about either version of its design, but I’ve always loved Porygon and I’m glad this guy gets some love. He may be exiled from the anime for all time, but at least the game designers treat him with respect. (Wonderful Fan Art by 29Steph5) ID 429: Igglybuff And now…for another baby Pokemon! Igglybuff is probably the least interesting of the slew of baby Pokemon the team designed for SW’97. Staying mostly static throughout development, Igglybuff gives off a “paint by numbers” sort of vibe in its design: as if now that the team knew they needed more baby Pokemon, they just followed a template to create one for the Jigglypuff family. By this time in Era III, the team had already designed four baby Pokemon to fill out the roster: Betobebii, Doduno, Smoochum, and Magby. All four of those Pokemon were designed from relatively obscure or unpopular Generation I Pokemon, and Smoochum and Magby formed part of a trio of baby Pokemon that didn’t follow the patterns set by the rest (they evolved at a later, level, had higher stats, and learned most of the same moves their adult forms learned). Compared to them, Igglybuff is a reversion to the pattern set by Period 2a, in which the team had designed two babies as cuter versions of existing mascot Pokemon. It's even grouped together with them in the Spaceworld '97 Pokedex. Igglybuff, in particular, seems more or less a clone of Cleffa. They were more or less revised in concert with each other: Both of them got their first stats in April 1999, and they both follow a similar pattern in setting their stats (both lose from 5 to 25 stat points in all of their stats compared to their grown-up forms). They also both had their gender ratios adjusted at the same time, on August 30th, 1999, to be 25% male and 75% female. Both have all the same moves as their adult forms in Spaceworld ’97, like the rest of the babies. That's nothing notable, but when the game was rebooted in 1999, both of them lost all those moves except for a few weak beginning moves, and Sweet Kiss, which cannot be learned by their adult forms. Again, this is not notable (Pichu, for instance, follows the same moveset pattern). However, in the case of Cleffa and Igglybuff, changing their movesets in this way made them practically identical: One has Encore; the other has Defense Curl. Now, to be fair, Clefairy and Jigglypuff were always very similar Pokemon. But the way that these were changed at the same time, the similarity in movesets and stats, etc, just make me think that the designers created Igglybuff simply to make sure that the Clefairy and Jigglypuff families would continue to be counterparts. Thus, Igglybuff doesn’t seem like an inspired design; it feels like someone on the team checking off a box. This is likewise probably why, out of the ten babies designed in Era III, Igglybuff was one of only three that survived the 1999 reboot (the others being Smoochum and Magby, and we’ve talked about why they stayed on the roster). As long as Cleffa was going to be in the game, I suspect the team was committed to Jigglypuff having a baby form as well. Like Cleffa, Igglybuff’s sprites didn’t undergo a complete rework, like say Pichu; instead, they were slightly redone over the course of development, focusing most on its expression and the tuft on the top of its head. Both Cleffa and Igglybuff, interestingly, had their sprites revised almost entirely around these two aspects of their design; Cleffa also gained a nicer smile and the antenna on the top of its head changed significantly. I suspect Sugimori was the creator of both of these babies; this gradual revision of the sprites is very much his style; likewise, Sugimori was very likely to keep the original sprite and just modify parts on top of it as he revised, rather than creating a new sprite. In its initial form, Igglybuff was just a round ball with arms and legs (with a little spiral denoting the one curl of hair some babies have), but during the 1999 reboot, Igglybuff got a small tuft of fluff on its head. This is actually more significant than it at first appears, because if you focus on this tuft, you’ll notice that it looks like the end of a balloon that gets tied off after blowing it up. Jigglypuff had originally been designed to be a balloon Pokemon, but not much of that inspiration made it into Jigglypuff’s final sprite. I appreciate that Sugimori’s revisions were trying to bring Igglybuff visually closer to those origins. (Cleffa, likewise, underwent a similar revision. Clefairy’s final Gen I sprite was vaguely based on a star, but it doesn’t quite come through the sprite. Cleffa was lifewise revised to have more of a five-pointed star silhouette, to evoke that design inspiration more than Clefairy otherwise does.) Unfortunately, this nice nod to Igglybuff’s balloon inspirations was lost in the final sprite; Sugimori (or whoever revised it) presumably decided that the single tuft on the top of Igglybuff’s head was either aesthetically weird, or he decided that having the tied of end of the balloon was a bit too on the nose. The tuft was instead revised into a larger three pointed bob that more clearly looks like hair. In doing this, the spiral also lost its connotations as a baby's first curl of hair, since now Igglybuff had hair coming out of its head! While I do like the reference to balloons more, I have to admit that the final sprite looks just a bit better, so it was probably for the best. Igglybuff’s face also got revised during these tweaks, going from a strange and dopey looking smile, to an ecstatic open mouth, to a more controlled and arguably cuter smile for Crystal. Igglybuff’s cute, don’t get me wrong! But I do think that a lot of the other discarded babies would have been more interesting additions to Gold and Silver than Igglybuff. And again--like Cleffa--Igglybuff is great for making a cute Pokemon even cuter. But for gameplay, there isn’t really a reason for it to exist. ID 430: Koonya Koonya, on the other hand, is a bit more interesting than Igglybuff. Koonya has a number of odd features about it: it lasted longer than many of the other babies, it has some oddities to its sprite, and most interestingly, it is probably a remnant of Gen I’s design. Koonya’s cute! It’s one of the more significant losses from the SW’97 period of development. Koonya’s a baby version of Meowth. It’s an adorable kitten, so unlike Meowth, it’s sleeping rather than awake and alert like Meowth. It also has a coin on its head that’s worth a lot less than Meowth’s; TCRF tells me that Koonya’s coin is a 5-yen coin and Meowth’s is a Koban. It’s name is either a portmanteau of “ko” (child) and “nya” (meow), or it’s a combination of “Coin” and “Nya”. Beyond its pose, there’s not much difference between them. Koonya’s slightly smaller, but the overall body shape and characteristics are more or less the same. Given how different Meowth is to Persian, you'd expect a least a little differentiation, but the designers didn’t really go that route. Meowth was already pretty cute, and so maybe they weren’t sure how to make an even cuter version that still broadcast “cat” as well as Meowth did? Koonya's sprite does have one oddity: the coins floating over Koonya’s head make no sense, no matter how you look at them. Why are those coins there? They look a little like bits, or small laser shooting satellites from Japanese shoot ‘em ups, but why would a kitten have Bits (yes, Racie, pun intended)? It’s not like it’s a psychic type. Some people have suggested that the coins are just in the air above its head, but if that’s so, the sprite does a really bad job of depicting that. To add to that, Koonya’s backsprite, which otherwise matches the pose of its front sprite perfectly, doesn’t feature the coins at all, making it seem likely that the coins were somehow not supposed to be part of the final sprite. But if so, that’s strange too: no other sprites in Spaceworld ’97 have clearly unfinished parts like this. And notice that the sprite was touched up before June 1999, yet the coins were left in the composition; that makes it seem like they were supposed to be there. The most plausible explanation, as explained by TCRF, is that these coins were alternatives the artist drew because they weren’t sure which one would fit best on Koonya’s head. Which makes a lot of sense: The left coin is clearly the coin they’d already chosen, though the right coin looks so similar it’s almost indistinguishable. The middle coin, on the other hand, looks a bit more distinctive but also makes Koonya look more like Meowth, something they were probably smart to avoid. Also notice that the coin was slightly changed in the June 1999 touch up to the sprite, in that the middle dot was changed to a different color. It still doesn’t make sense why these coins are still in the June 1999 composition: maybe the person who touched it up was different from the original creator, and they didn’t know the coins weren’t supposed to be there? But given the available evidence, I’m liable to say this is most likely what happened. Koonya, at least according to common wisdom, is likely a holdover from Generation I’s development. In Red and Green's internal index, there is data for the backsprite of an unused Pokemon that looks like a baby Meowth: If this is true, it makes Koonya the last Pokemon in the Korean Index to date back to Generation I's development. Honestly, it feels out of place in Era III, which mostly avoided using old Pokemon designs. I have my suspicions that Madame was a holdover from Gen I, and I'll discuss my suspicions about Pudi in the next entry. Other than them though, everything in Era III seems designed specifically for Gold and Silver, which makes Koonya stand out. My best guess is that the team came to Koonya from the other end: they didn't design Koonya based on the unused ID 134, but they went looking for candidates for baby Pokemon and realized that Meowth would work well, leading them back to the idea of a Pre-Meowth design. Or maybe they just made a completely new Meowth baby form and it was coincidence that something similar existed in Generation I. After all, the poses of the unused ID 134 doesn't match Koonya's at all. It's tail is completely different from Koonya's, and it seems to have a different type of coin on its head than Koonya does. If Koonya was a Generation I import, they almost completely redesigned it, whereas Mikon, Gyopin, Puchikoon, and even Kotora all seem more or less identical, designwise, to the backsprites we have from Generation I. In fact, these drastic differences made me examine the Generation I backsprite even more, and I've started to wonder if it really was a Meowth Pre-evolution. ID 134 in the source code for Pokemon Blue does have a sprite for a Meowth-like Pokemon, but that Pokemon lacks any data that ties it definitively to Meowth. There’s no evolution data linking the two—though many of the unused Pokemon lack evolution data so this is not solid proof—and there’s no moveset data or cry that would link them together. Furthermore, we know that some of the unused backsprites from Gen I’s source code were probably not distinct Pokemon: ID 32 has a backsprite that’s almost certainly just an early backsprite for Nidoran Male or Nidorino, and ID 140’s backsprite is most likely an early unfinished backsprite for Magneton, not a distinct third form for the Magnemite family. The Pre-Meowth Sprite in ID 134 doesn’t look all that different from Meowth: what’s to say it wasn’t just an early Meowth backsprite that was left there when Meowth was shuffled earlier into the Internal Index? I mean, look at them side by side. If all we had were backsprites, is there anything that denotes the left one as a pre-evolution of the right one? Just going by back sprites, it seems far more likely that these backsprites were made for the same Pokemon, and the left one was just discarded. In fact, we know that Meowth's backsprite used to be larger. A lot of Pokemon that evolved later had their backsprites shrunken so they would look smaller in comparison to their evolved forms. Isn't a simpler explanation that this "Koonya" backsprite was just a Meowth backsprite before they shrunk it? There are some other oddities that make me question whether Koonya was ever in Generation I. First, let's pay attention to the stats of the Meowth line. I covered this in detail in the Puchikoon article, but in brief: In Generation I, Pokemon followed a strict pattern when evolving, usually gaining total stats in a set pattern. A second form Pokemon in a two-stage line--for instance, Koffing and Weezing--tend to get +125 to their total stats, while in a three-stage line, the second form got +75 and the third got +100 (sometimes +75 again). For examples of that second pattern, see the Nidoran families, Pidgeot, and the starter Pokemon. This pattern follows pretty consistently, but there are certain Pokemon lines that break the pattern. Some instances: the Zubat family, the Ponyta family, the Goldeen family, the Psyduck family, and a few more. In these two-stage families, the jump between the first form and the final form is not +125, like it would be in a two stage line, but +175. Importantly, if they were three stage families and one stage was missing, these stats would fit the general pattern. And, of course, that's what's so interesting: most of the Pokemon families that break this stat pattern were later discovered to have discarded evolutionary stages in Blue's source code! Their stats actually hint that one of their evolutions was cut in development (if only we had realized this before the leaks!). Except the Meowth line doesn’t follow this pattern. Persian gains 125 BST upon evolution, just like you’d expect a two-stage line to do. Which suggests that Meowth never had a pre-evolutionary form at all. Helix Chamber argues that this is just proof that Pre-Meowth was deleted sooner than the rest, or it was added and then deleted very late in the day, after stats were already allocated to Pokemon families. Both explanations are possible. But the simplest explanation is just that ID 134 was never a Meowth evolution, but just an early draft of Meowth itself. Furthermore, (and I know this is getting into the weeds and I apologize; please check out Helixchamber's article here for more specifics) a Pre-Meowth does not fit the patterns of Generation I's internal Index. ID 134 falls squarely in Gen I’s Period 4b, which was a series of Pokemon designs which were created as evolutionary relatives to Pokemon from Era I, the earliest creatures created (originally when the game was Capumon). But Meowth's not in this part of the Internal Index; its multiple slots later, in Era II (It's also weirdly misplaced in Era II, which makes it possible it was shuffled around from later in the Index). Saying that, if this was just an old slot for Meowth, it also wouldn't fit the established patterns: Persian was designed as part of Period 4b as well. None of what I'm saying is definitive, honestly. It's very possible, even probable, that ID 134 was a Meowth Pre-Evolution and not just a discarded Meowth backsprite. But given that Koonya was introduced in Era III of Gen II’s development rather than Period 2c-- when the team dug up the old Gen I designs for Puchikoon, Gyopin, and Mikon and made them into babies--it suggests more evidence that Koonya was a new Pokemon and not a holdover at all. I know we all want it to be true that there was a lost kitten in Generation I. And there very well may have been. But the evidence I’m seeing, while not conclusive, seems to suggest otherwise. The only other thing to note about Koonya is that it lasted a bit longer in the roster than most of the other baby Pokemon. When development was rebooted in 1999, ten baby Pokemon were culled from the list; it was clearly a priority for the team to move in a direction that featured much less baby Pokemon (probably because they’re useless in battle, obscure to find, and are too directly related to Generation I). The only ones that survived past this culling were all the baby Pokemon that made it to the final game, and funny enough, Koonya. Koonya’s sprite was even revised after the reboot to change its face and to give it a more pleasing palette. However, even though the sprite exists at least until June 1999, Koonya’s clearly already been dropped by that point. It’s typing is gone, as are any stats it may have been given; it doesn’t even have a name, and is instead found under “Mitei 05” (Pending 05). All this suggests that its sprite was being used as a placeholder until the team designed something new for that slot. The revised sprite suggests that there was a moment when Koonya was still going to be in the final games, but after June 1999, that doesn’t seem like a possibility. We know that Mitei 05 eventually became Pineco because Pineco’s shiny palette matches Koonya’s palette from June 1999. Pineco still had rough sprites even by the November 1999, when Spaceworld ’99 was built, also suggesting how late in the game the team came up with that idea. It was probably a good choice: Pineco could show off the new Headbutt mechanics found in the game, while Koonya…well, you might be able to breed one in the post-game. I get it, Koonya’s cute, but this one’s no real loss. More or less everything you get from Koonya existing, you already got from Meowth. I’m not in love with Pineco, but the diversity Pineco adds to the roster is by far a worthwhile trade for this cutie. ID 431: Pudi It’s Pudi! He’s a cute puppy! Designed to be a pre-evolution for Growlithe, Pudi lived the same life as many of the baby Pokemon from Spaceworld ’97 and was deleted without a trace during the 1999 reboot of Gold and Silver. According to TCRF, his name is probably a mix between puchi (petit) and Gaadi (Growlithe’s) name. Another baby Pokemon that didn’t quite make the cut, there’s two things worth discussing about Pudi. First, was Pudi one of the lost Gen I designs? And second, what exactly is the relationship between Pudi and the strange, cartoony doppleganger that looks similar to him, found at ID 325? This entry’s a little weird for me. Almost two years ago, I first published an article that covered ID 325, what I was calling Proto-Pudi, where I first dealt with the mystery connecting those sprites with Pudi’s design. That was two years ago! At the time, I didn’t dream that I’d ever be nearly at the end of the Korean Index, or that so many people would read what I had to say. So thanks everyone! I’m sure my analysis has improved considerably since then, but you might want to go back to that article to read what I had to say there about whether Pudi and Proto-Pudi are related. I still don’t think they are, at least not as directly as some people think. But let me elaborate my thoughts on this one more time. Proto-Pudi (if you don’t mind calling it that) is a weird sprite. It doesn’t look that much like a Pokemon at all, though it does have some pose and body similarities to Snubbull, and at least one reader has suggested that it might have had some relationship with Smeargle (just look at those noses right next to each other). What Proto-Pudi definitely is not, is an evolutionary relative to Growlithe and Arcanine. It doesn’t look anything like them: it sits on two legs while they’re four legged creatures, it has a horn, and its proportions are cartoony, not realistic like Growlithe and Arcanine. The only possible way they could be related is if Proto-Pudi were a very early experiment with baby Pokemon, and the first concept for baby Pokemon was to make them hyper-cartoony and unrealistic to accentuate their cute characteristics (even more so that Pichu or Cleffa, which still clearly fit, art style wise, next to the adult versions). At the same time, as I said two years ago, the similarities to Pudi are undeniable. They both have the same tail, the same floppy ears, and though Proto-Pudi’s mouth is much bigger and deformed, it is clearly the same type of mouth that Pudi has. There has to be some relationship between them. So here’s my theory. Proto-Pudi was designed as part of Period 1c, which was a transitory period. The Pokemon in 1c were usually more developed than the ones in 1a or 1b, though there were still a few oddballs that seem like they were only rough ideas. Most of the designs in 1c, if not all, were done by Atsuko Nishida. My guess, looking back on that part of the Korean Index, is that 1c was a space for Nishida’s early brainstorming sessions. She came up with all her initial ideas for the new game in this segment of the Korean Index, then decided which ones she would develop further and which she'd discard. Notice that almost all of the Pokemon in Period 1c got later redesigned, suggesting that even the ones that made it to the final were unrefined, rough ideas when they were first put into the Korean Index. Thus, Proto-Pudi was probably a very rough brainstorm, likely around the idea of a fun cartoony dog creature (a role that Snubbull eventually filled). My guess is that when Proto-Pudi was initially created, it had no connection to Growlithe or any other Pokemon. However, much later in Period 3b, all the designers were tasked to come up with evolutionary relatives for Generation I Pokemon, and in looking for inspiration, Nishida may have gone back through her early brainstorming sheet and found Proto-Pudi again. Realizing that the idea could work as a puppy, Nishida reworked the basic design into a pre-Growlithe, and then called it a day. Proto-Pudi had probably been abandoned a long time ago, and so from Nishida’s perspective, this unused design was a good place to draw from. This theory would account for their similarities while also explaining why Proto-Pudi just doesn’t fit in with the Growlithe line; I’m more or less content to believe this account of events as the most plausible reason these sprites look so similar yet so different. Proto-Pudi was related to Pudi, but through a much more round about way then we might have assumed. This question seemingly solved, let’s also discuss another, mutually exclusive, question about Pudi: was Pudi originally designed for Generation I? There are a few reasons to think this is also a possibility. First, it’d be a lot less strange that Koonya was pulled from Generation I if the very next Pokemon next to it in the Korean Index was also a holdover from Generation I. In fact, in Gen I’s internal index, there’s even a possible slot for where Pudi might have gone, right next to Pre-Meowth. If Koonya’s predecessor was in slot 134, 135 is notably blank; whatever was in there didn’t still have a back sprite in the Blue Source code. Since Pudi directly followed Koonya in the Korean Index, is it possible they were adapted to Generation II as a block, and Pudi was originally side by side with Pre-Meowth in Generation I? Furthermore, if Pudi did fill slot 135, it would continue to fit the pattern for Period 4b. Like I said above, Period 4b was mostly about creating evolutions for Pokemon designed in Period 1. And,like I said above, Pre-Meowth doesn’t quite fit this pattern (Meowth is found in Period 2!) but Pudi would, since Arcanine and Growlithe can both be found in the earliest stages of Generation I's development. And remember how Meowth and Persian’s stats don’t indicate that there was, at some point, a third form in their evolutionary family? Well, Growlithe and Arcanine do: Arcanine gains 175 BST when it evolves from Growlithe, a pattern that suggests at one point the Growlithe line evolved twice.
Weird, right? On top of that, the Growlithe line was the version exclusive counterpart for Vulpix, and in many other ways, these Pokemon were mirrored in Red and Green. It seems unlikely that the Vulpix family would ever have been considered as a three-stage line (if you include Mikon) but the Growlithe family didn't get the same consideration. Of course, they could have been made counterparts only retroactively—after all Vulpix seems to have been originally devised as part of a Water/Electric/Fire triad feature the Goldeen and Kotora families. But it's still suspicious. However, as convincing as all this evidence may be, Proto-Pudi seems to be the fly in the ointment to this theory. Because if Pudi really was a Generation I holdover, then why does it resemble Proto-Pudi, to the point that it seems designed as a revised version of Proto-Pudi? I don’t really have any good answer to this question; the existence of Proto-Pudi seems to definitively nix the idea that Pudi ever predated it. The only possible explanation that would make sense of this contradiction was if the Pudi from Generation I was so sketchy or undefined that it needed to be completely redone from scratch when it was imported into Generation II. Maybe it never even had sprites but was just planned: that could explain why Slot 135 has no backsprites in the Blue Source code. Alternatively, maybe Generation I’s pre-Growlithe looked much more similar to Proto-Pudi, for whatever reason, and Proto-Pudi is a more faithful rendering of what Pre-Growlithe looked like. I don’t know. The big problem with Pudi is that each of these explanations—that is, my explanation for the relationship between Pudi and Proto-Pudi, and my suggestion that Pudi was a Generation I design—convince me on their own of their veracity. However, they both seem unlikely to be true at the same time, as the evidence from either seems to contradict the other theory. Thus, it feels like only one or the other is true: either something completely different was going on with Proto-Pudi and Pudi was from Generation I, or Pudi was simply remade from Proto-Pudi and its design had nothing to do with Generation I. Whatever the truth is, it seems to still be a mystery. Anyway, you know the story with Pudi. Created for Spaceworld '97, Pudi was discarded with the majority of the rest of the baby Pokemon after the 1999 reboot. Pudi didn't really contribute a lot, it's cute but it's not very important for gameplay. You know the spiel by now.
5 Comments
Alex
5/11/2023 07:42:38 am
Love the Animon transforming into a metal pokemon--a fun power-up for ditto, and a showcase for the new type. Brilliant!
Reply
SolemnStormcloud
6/8/2023 10:42:57 am
https://tcrf.net/File:Pok%C3%A9mon_Early_Arcanine.png
Reply
Asmorano
6/9/2023 10:43:33 am
That would make a lot of sense: the best explanation for why we don't have Gen I Pudi's sprites (besides it not existing) would be because those sprites were thrown away much earlier than everything else. If they redesigned Arcanine and Growlithe, they may have just not bothered to update Pudi's sprites at all.
Reply
Gooper Blooper
6/13/2023 09:27:34 am
I'm very confident Porygon2 is directly referencing a drinking bird toy! The giveaway is its' animation in Pokemon Stadium 2:
Reply
Egon370
4/19/2024 10:09:49 am
notably due to the game center CX interview we know slot 135 had a sprite at some point
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorMy name's Aaron George; I'm a Historian, and interested in Pokemon's development as a hobby. Contact me at @asmoranomardicodais Archives
July 2023
Categories |