Comment by throwup238
9 days ago
Whats the deal with this artwork? I got into Pokemon as a kid in the late 90s* including all the Gameboy games through Sapphire/Ruby and I don’t remember any of this washed out art (like the Ditto example, it’s always been pink!).
Did I just miss this phenomenon entirely because I grew up right before it became big on the internet?
* I think I’ve still got a VHS tape of the promo material Nintendo used to originally introduce Pokemon to the US.
It was in the manual and the Player's Guide. You can find ditto on page 47 of the latter.
https://www.scribd.com/document/586237858/Pokemon-Red-Versio...
https://archive.org/details/NintendoPower1998PokemonRedBlue/...
I definitely remember seeing Gen1 pokemon art as a kid that seemed, not washed out exactly but a bit less saturated compared to, say, the Pokémon anime that aired on American TV. To the extent I thought about this, I guess I assumed that when the original creators of Pokemon in Japan were first working on it (I doubt I had heard the name Tajiri Satoshi at that point in my life), they were doing hand-drawn experimental art, still trying to get the final design correct.