There are currently 898 species of Pokemon,
but there’s only one that just about everyone recognises: Pikachu. But if you were playing Pokemon back in the
90s, you might have a very different image of how Pikachu looks. He’s uh, big. Put the two side by side, and you can see
just how much this character's design has changed. So what’s the reason for that? Well, let’s answer the question: Why doesn’t
Pikachu look like he used to? So, if we’re talking about Pikachu’s design,
we need to go back to when Pikachu was FIRST designed, in the 1990s. This guy, Satoshi Tajiri, had long dreamed
of making a game based on his childhood experiences of catching bugs. What if you could play a videogame where you
caught monsters, instead? So, the developers at Game Freak began bringing
this idea to life, designing hundreds of different Pocket Monsters, or Pokemon for short. Illustrator Ken Sugimori explained, “When
you hear “monster” you think “tough-looking” so we were making the game with the image
of tough-looking monsters fighting each other, but we then had some people within the development
team say “I want to see more cute monsters.”” They figured that if people were going to
trade these Pokemon, then there needed to be a variety of different kinds of creatures. So, they asked another designer at the company,
called Atsuko Nishida, to design something more cute looking. Nishida was one of the few women at the company,
and she doesn’t like to show her face in interviews, hence the big fluffy Pikachu plushie
that she’s holding here. So, Nishida was only given two requests: the
creature should be an electric type, and it needed two evolutions. She immediately started prototyping all kinds
of different designs using the pixel art editor. That's right, she didn’t plan the Pokemon
on paper, she drew the designs directly as pixel art. The data for her very first prototype has
been lost, but she says that it looked like a Japanese sweet snack called a Daifuku. Here’s what a real life Daifuku looks like,
except Nishida’s design had ears on it, too. She named the creature "Pikachu" on a complete
whim. “Pika” is an onomatopoeia for sparkling
or shining, which Nishida added because the creature was meant to be electric type. And “chu” is the noise a mouse makes. Except, at the time, her weird Daifuku thing
wasn’t actually meant to be a mouse. So, why did she add “chu”? “I actually don’t remember the reason…”
she said in an interview. So, Nishida showed this design to her boss
Koji Nishino, but Nishino said, “Make it cuter!” In fact, this cycle went on and on, with Nishino
telling Nishida to make her designs cuter and cuter. Eventually, she added puffy cheeks inspired
by a squirrel, where she imagined Pikachu’s electricity would be stored. And the spiky zig-zaggy tail was added for
the same reason: to make Pikachu look more electric. So eventually, Pikachu was approved to go
in the game. It was actually a favourite of Koji Nishino,
so he made it really rare to try and make it harder to find for players. But, this actually made it super popular:
everyone wanted to catch the rare Pokemon Pikachu! So, Pikachu’s first design was that black
and white pixel art that you see in those very first two games. As for Pikachu’s yellow colour? Well, when Pokemon Red and Green were in development,
Game Freak decided to make them compatible with something called the Super Game Boy,
which blew up tiny little Game Boy games onto huge TV screens, and in some cases added colour
to them as well. And so, Game Freak had to quickly pick colours
for each Pokemon. It was illustrator Ken Sugimori who suggested
yellow for Pikachu, for the simple reason that Pikachu was electric type, and yellow
made him think of electricity. After the game’s release, Ken Sugimori actually
went through every single Pokemon from the game and created high quality official artwork
of them. And this is where Pikachu’s original design
was finally finalised. This is the Pikachu that fans affectionately
refer to as “fat Pikachu”. So, why did the design change? What’s wrong with this Pikachu? Well, let me explain. About one year later, it was decided that
the Pokemon games and card games were going to be adapted into an anime series for TV,
directed by a guy called Kunihiko Yuyama. And for the very first episode, Yuyama had
a problem: which starter Pokemon should the main character pick? If he picked any of the three starters from
the game, it would alienate any viewers who DIDN’T pick that starter. So, he decided to pick a completely different
Pokemon - one which people were just starting to talk about more and more: Pikachu! Pikachu would be the main character’s chosen
Pokemon, and the companion on his journey. When that first episode aired, Pikachu’s
popularity SOARED, to the point where almost everyone recognises Pikachu nowadays. However, having Pikachu appear so regularly
presented a bit of a problem: Pikachu wasn’t very easy to animate. He was short and squat and wide, and look
at his tiny hands! They're just not that expressive... So, for the anime Game Freak made some changes
to his design: they gave him bigger arms, and a longer neck - generally more human looking. Ken Sugimori explained, “Since the animation
had them doing a variety of movements, including human-like gestures, we changed the shape
of Pikachu’s body to make acting easier. While Pikachu was originally very short and
stout, we gradually gave it a more defined neck and elongated its spine.” Ooh, that sounds gruesome. So as the Pokemon videogame series continued
on, Pikachu’s design in the games took much more inspiration from the modified anime design,
rather than Ken Sugimori’s old illustration. In Sugimori's own words, “The Pikachu appearing
in the Pokemon series after the broadcast of the animated series was influenced by how
it appeared in the show…” I mean, just compare his design from Pokemon
Red and Green, with how he looks in Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire! But it’s not like the Ruby and Sapphire
design was the definitive one. Pikachu’s design hugely varied between the
anime, the videogames, and even the card game, too! Here’s a huge chart that Japanese Twitter
user and Pokemon expert Takasa-ojichan put together showing all of the various Pikachu
designs. And right in the middle, this one design here
is very important. Because in 2004, after years of Pikachu having
a somewhat inconsistent character design, Game Freak decided to set the design in stone
and create a definitive Pikachu design to be used as a reference for everything that
followed it. This is the so-called “digital base model”. And here’s the thing: if you play any of
the modern Pokemon games, and look at Pikachu, he will look like this. Or Pikachu from the live action film - again,
his design is based on this one from 2004. Every Pikachu design after 2004 was based
on that one consistent base. And that’s why Pikachu’s design has finally
stopped changing so much! Except, for one game. Pokemon Sword and Shield. Ok, so normally Pikachu looks just about how
you expect him to look. But this game has the Gigantamax mechanic
where you can supersize your Pokemon to an absolutely huge scale. And if you gigantamax Pikachu, then he might
look familiar: Pikachu's Gigantamax form is actually based on the old original design
of the character, the “fat Pikachu” if you like. That was a really cool reference that Game
Freak put in the game, I love that they acknowledged the pretty huge change that Pikachu’s design
has gone through. For a few years in the very early days of
the Pokemon series, if you looked at a picture of Pikachu, you really didn’t know what
he was gonna look like. And, I don't know, I think there’s something
kinda cool about that! Hey, thanks for watching to the end! I hope you enjoyed this look back at Pikachu’s
design! You can follow me on Twitter @thomasgdocs
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