Did you know? Instead of badges, Pokemon trainers
almost travelled around collecting belts. Drawing inspiration from East Asian martial arts, the
first Gym Leader would've given you a white belt, and the last Gym Leader a black belt. Game Freak
even considered letting you whip your Pokemon with them, like some sort of lion tamer. In our hunt
for Pokemon secrets for this video, we went to great lengths to ensure these facts would actually
be something that 99% of you had never heard of. And one thing we did was have 100 pages of a
Japan- only book translated which was written by Game Freak developer Akihito Tomisawa -- and it’s
where this first fact comes from. In the book, Tomisawa writes: "...The development staff decided
humans should have 'ranks' as monster trainers. The initial idea was that as the player's
Pokemon reached a certain level of strength, they would earn 'belts' like a martial
artist." Recreating their conversation, he recalls them saying: "Not just white belts
and black belts like in Judo, there should be more colors. Well if you can receive a belt, what
if you could use it as a training whip? Like a red whip, or a black whip. Or a yellow whip."
Tomisawa goes on to say that "...Ultimately, it was too cruel to make the player whip
their Pokemon, so the idea got scrapped. Their relationship with the player should be
friendlier, like a pet owner. So eventually it was decided you'd earn badges [instead]."
But even though the belt idea got thrown out, actual whips were still very much on the menu.
As we’ve mentioned in the past, this beta sprite shows Trainer Red carried a whip at some point in
Red & Green's development, and even though Red's eventually got taken away, lots of other trainers'
whips still made it into Gen 1's final build. Another interesting story we found in our
translations was the time Pokemon's creator Satoshi Tajiri gave away a copy of Pokemon Red
where the player was named "Dumbass." In a 1997 issue of Japanese magazine Famimaga 64, he tells
the interviewer Yuuki: "Recently I’ve been buying used copies of Pokemon at second-hand stores. It’s
interesting to see the nicknames people give their Pokemon. The player’s name on this red one is a
real gem... [he] named himself Dumbass. Maybe so the game will say ‘player is a dumbass’ in the
menu." Then Tajiri whips out copies of Red and Blue that he pasted homemade stickers onto --
which if they still exist, are probably worth a fortune nowadays After joking around with
Yuuki for a while, he gives her the custom Red cartridge as a gift, then says he'll give away
the custom Blue cart and five of his autographs in a contest for the magazine's readers. Yuuki wants
to keep them all to herself, but eventually they agree Tajiri will also give away his copy
of Red where the player's named Dumbass. Whoever the lucky kid was who won that contest,
hopefully he never overwrote that save file. Before we get to more Pokemon facts, a quick word
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Manscaped-dot-com! And now back to Pokemon. Our next fact is about where the idea for fossil
Pokemon came from. The answer can be found in a 34 page interview Tajiri did in the Japanese book
"Pokemon Story," published in the year 2000. It's pretty well known that Tajiri caught bugs as a
kid in the mountains and forests near his home in rural Japan. His town modernized rapidly as he
grew older, and the nature he’d catch bugs in got paved over and turned into a city, complete with
an arcade where he'd often skip school to go play video games. As an adult he combined those two
ideas -- catching bugs and video games -- to make Pokemon. But what you probably haven't
heard is the longer version of the story he tells in this book, where he says the construction
workers discovered tons of fossils as they were paving over his childhood. Construction came to a
total standstill until the fossil situation could be sorted out, and during that time Tajiri and
his friends made a habit of going to the site to dig up fossils of their own. He goes on to say
that he later took a school field trip to the Izu Islands south of Tokyo, and that's how he came
up with Cinnabar Island. In fact, the entirety of Kanto was based on his own childhood. Even Kanto's
size was based on how far he could ride his bike as a kid. He says: "I was able to ride my bike
about 10 kilometers [from home]... The way riding my bike expanded the world around me was part of
my inspiration for Pokemon. When you use a train, you feel like you're taking a trip. [So for
Pokemon,] I wanted to keep things more grounded, like how my friends and I would see how far we
could ride from home, to create a world that felt real." A little later in the interview, Tajiri
says Gen 2's game world was based on how far he could take a train, which is why the region
was originally modeled after the whole of Japan. Eighteen years after this interview, an
early build of Gold & Silver leaked online, finally giving fans a chance to see the region
Tajiri was talking about, which ultimately got scrapped and replaced with Johto. Check
it out, it's Japan turned on its side. And now for more of a light hearted tidbit
-- Have you ever noticed Unova Champion Alder breaks the rules of the Pokemon world by
carrying more than six Poke Balls? We found an explanation in a 2010 issue of Japanese magazine
Nintendo Dream, where Alder's creator Yusuke Ohmura says it's because he never learned
how to use a computer. And also, weirdly, Ohmura had trouble making Alder *not* look like
Jesus. He says: "...As I drew Alder I thought of him as a charming person, but my initial design
was far too 'evangelist-like,' he looked like Christ or something. But I couldn’t get that image
out of my head, so I consulted with Sugimori, who told me to dial back the evangelist shtick
so he’d look like some kind of wanderer... Also, Alder has Poke Balls hanging not only around his
neck, but under his cloak as well. That's because he doesn’t know how to use a PC. So he’s unable
to store his Pokemon." Gen 5's art director Ken Sugimori was in that interview as well, and added:
"You’re only supposed to be able to carry 6 at a time, so having 7 or more PokeBalls is weird. But
he can’t use a PC so he carries them all with him, not just his main team. All his
balls are just jangling around." Our next fact actually comes from that 1997
Famimaga 64 interview we mentioned earlier. One question Yuuki asked Tajiri was why Porygon
exists. Simply put, Porygon was created to be ironic, as a response to all the people who told
him 1996 was too late to make a Game Boy game. Here's how Tajiri explains it: "At the time,
I didn’t see anyone playing Game Boy anymore, and it’d lost a lot of its popularity. I was at
the barbershop once and someone asked ‘So you’re making a game? What kind of game?’ When I told
them ‘It’s for the Game Boy,’ this guy I didn’t even know said ‘The Game Boy? You’re a bit late
on that one'... Everyone kept telling me ‘Tajiri, you need to start making polygon games
for next generation consoles.’ But I was designing Pokemon for Game Boy, where it’s
impossible to use polygonal 3D graphics. But people kept hounding me about it, so
I thought it would be ironic to include a Pokemon called Porygon... Adults notice the
irony, but kids don’t get it — they just think ‘what a cute Pokemon’ and play with it.
Once they become a little more familiar with computers they’ll realize ‘oh that was
supposed to be irony'... Pokemon has tons of words that kids won’t understand the
meaning of until 10 or 20 years later." If you're one of the fans who's realizing right
now that Porygon was meant to be ironic, let us know in the comments. If you didn't realize before
this video, Tajiri's 1997 prediction came true. And our next piece is about how Pokemon was
originally planned as a much smaller game, and Pokemon's producer Shigeru Miyamoto didn't
even want it to be an RPG. Red & Green launched in 1996, but Tajiri pitched it to Nintendo subsidiary
Creatures Inc back in early 1990, with a contract to finish it in October the same year. In fact,
Creatures thought it was gonna be so similar to another creature-collecting game they were gonna
make that they cancelled it our of respect for Tajiri. In that Tomisawa book we translated,
Creatures chairman Tsunekazu Ishihara says: "To tell you the truth, [Creatures] already had
its own idea for a game like Pokemon, something incredibly similar. The game was called Toto, and
it used the Game Boy like an insect cage to be filled with creatures you owned. At the same time
we were talking about it, Tajiri brought us his idea for Pokemon where youths catch monsters and
trade them with a Link Cable. It wasn’t a question of which idea came first, but we did think
Tajiri would wonder, 'How could they do this to me when it was MY idea??'" Ishihara goes on to say
Creatures thought the main difference between Toto and Pokemon was gonna be the link cable trading,
so they ultimately decided not to make Toto. But Tajiri's small idea eventually got a lot bigger,
as he explained in another Japanese publication, saying: "We figured we could probably make a Game
Boy game in about six months. But our goals for Pokemon just grew and grew, so we eventually
realized it’d be difficult to develop that quickly. Of course, ultimately our six month plan
didn’t work out (laughs)." Shigeru Miyamoto liked the idea of collecting and trading monsters
because it was an idea that would only work on Game Boy, and he's always loved games that are
only possible on the system they're played on. But even though he liked the concept, he didn't think
Pokemon should be an RPG. Here's what he said in that Tomisawa book: “At the stage where we just
had the basic idea for Pokemon, I didn’t care what genre it would be. It was Tajiri who thought
it wouldn’t be complete if it wasn't an RPG. I was concerned that if we made an RPG, we
wouldn’t know when we’d finish, and I thought we should just focus more on the essence of the
game. But as the producer, [it wasn't my call], so Pokemon ended up in the form it is now, and I’m
honestly not sure if that was the right decision." Now more than 20 years later, I guess fans
have to ask themselves -- would Pokemon be a better series if it *wasn't* an RPG? What if it
was still about collecting and trading Pokemon, but the gameplay was an entirely different
genre? Let us know in the comments if you think Tajiri was right to hold his ground, or if he
should've listened to his idol, Shigeru Miyamoto. And now we’re going to jump back into cut from
Gen II, let's talk about one of the Johto’s lesser known scrapped areas, the lost suicide forest.
That entire Japan-based region was scrapped, but later in development there were also parts of
Johto that got cut, but can still be found in the games' internal data. Most of them are just early
designs for Johto's cities. Possibly the most interesting is the Lake of Rage, which originally
had an entire town built around it. There's also a tiny Safari Zone once meant for Fuschia City. But
the map we really wanna highlight is this forest, which the data refers to as "FUJI." This Fuji
forest was originally located at the foot of Mt Silver, which is based on the real life Mt Fuji in
Japan. In fact, in early builds of Gold & Silver, Mt Silver was literally called Mt Fuji. In the
real world, there's a forest at the foot of Mt Fuji called the Sea of Trees, also known as "the
Suicide Forest." It's got a historical reputation as a home to ghosts, and it's one of the most
used suicide sites globally at over 100 deaths per year. The government even puts up signs in the
forest that encourage suicidal visitors to think of their families and reach out to a suicide
prevention association. By the way, all this information was sent to us by Pia Carrot, a Gen
II disassembler and one of the members of Team Spaceworld, so full credit goes to him. In Gen
II's final build, there's only one new Ghost type, Misdreavus, who can only be found at Mt Silver.
It's likely the forest was planned as a home not just for Misdreavus, but other Ghost Pokemon
as well, like these two that got cut during development. But in an effort to avoid the risk
of controversy, Game Freak ended up cutting the location and replacing it with this map, which
bears no resemblance to the Suicide Forest. Despite its removal though, the forest can still
be found, hidden in the games' internal data. Did you also know that Mew only exists because
of a secret that was rumored to be in an old arcade game? Click the video on-screen if
you wanna hear the full story. Or if you wanna learn more about Satoshi Tajiri, check out
this mini-biography we made about his life story. Click the like button if you want us
to keep translating more Pokemon books, and make sure to subscribe to stay
in the loop. Thanks for watching.
