Make Your Own Pokémon

Cover a Pokémon in black. Can you still tell who it is? For every single one of the 1,025 — the answer must be yes.

This is the first law of the studio. Game Freak designer Mana Ibe put it plainly in an interview: every Pokémon's silhouette must be identifiable and distinct from all the others — "we make sure we do our best not to overlap." The anime has run a segment for almost thirty years — Who's That Pokémon? — that is literally just this rule, played as a game, and you can win it. That's proof the rule works.

Where did the rule come from? Necessity. The original 151 weren't drawn as paintings first — they were built as tiny Game Boy sprites, just 56×56 pixels, in a handful of colours. At that size, detail dies. Only strong, simple, symbolic shapes survive. The famous watercolour art came AFTER — Ken Sugimori painted the finished sprites into portraits. The pixels were the design.

And when designs drifted too fancy years later, Sugimori himself said so in a magazine interview — things had become needlessly complex, he wanted a return to the simple spirit of Red and Blue. His favourite Pokémon? Gengar — "because it doesn't require many lines and is easy to draw." The best designer in the business votes for the simplest ghost.

Before a single detail is drawn, the base shapes have already told your brain what to feel.

Character designers everywhere — from Disney to game studios — use the same trick: circles feel friendly, soft and safe. Triangles feel sharp, fast and dangerous. Squares feel sturdy and dependable. It's not a Pokémon rule; it's a how-brains-work rule, and Pokémon uses it constantly. Pikachu and Jigglypuff are almost pure circles. Sneasel and Hydreigon bristle with triangles. Snorlax is one enormous soft square that learned to nap.

The masters then MIX the signals. Sugimori has described his own technique as "keeping the balance": if a design gets too cool, he adds something uncool or silly; too serious, he adds something cheerful. A round, adorable body with one row of back-spikes says "friendly — but don't push it." That contradiction is what makes a design feel alive instead of flat.

One more studio fact worth knowing: Sugimori didn't design every famous Pokémon himself — his own drawings skewed brutish and monster-like, so cute-specialist Atsuko Nishida was brought in, and she designed Pikachu, Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle. Even legendary studios need different hands with different superpowers. (Remember her name — she has the best story in this book, coming in Chapter 7.)

Type first. Colour second. Everything else third — because colour promises the player what this creature can do.

Since the Nintendo 64 days, every type has an official colour — Fire's orange-red, Water's blue, Grass's green, Poison's purple. That's why the starter trio is always green, red and blue: the very first choice a player makes doubles as a lesson in the Fire-beats-Grass, Water-beats-Fire triangle (it was printed as a diagram in the original instruction booklet!). Colour isn't decoration in this studio. It's information.

So when you design, you pick your type BEFORE your palette — and you should also know what your type choice costs you. That's what this machine is for. It's wired to the same verified type chart as your Battle School book.

In 1998, a small team at Nintendo of America sat in a room and invented 151 English names — by, in their own words, "literally smashing two words together… and trying to say it fast."

That team, led by localizer Bill Giese, engineered names you now say daily. The recipe is visible once you look:

Here's a real studio secret, straight from Charmander's designer: she drew Charizard's little brother BACKWARDS.

Atsuko Nishida has said she created Charmander by starting from Charizard and working in reverse — she wanted the leap from the cute base form to the fierce final form to feel "unimaginable." That's the evolution-line recipe: stage one is round and adorable (circle language!), stage three is sharp and proud (hello, triangles), and stage two is the awkward teenager in between.

The other half of the recipe is the family badge — one feature that survives all three stages so your eye knows they're related. Charmander's tail flame never goes out. Bulbasaur's bulb blooms but never leaves. When you design a line, choose the badge FIRST, then evolve everything around it.

And evolution serves gameplay too: Eevee exists because Satoshi Tajiri asked for a Pokémon that could branch into many elemental forms — the design followed the game idea, not the other way round. Design in this studio always has a JOB.

A Pokémon isn't finished when it looks right. It's finished when its numbers MATCH its looks.

You know stats from Battle School. Here's the designer's side of them: a creature that looks like a boulder should be slow and tough. A wisp should be frail and fast. When body and numbers agree, players understand a new Pokémon in one glance — that's the whole magic trick of good design. When they disagree, it feels like a lie.

Real Pokémon get a stat budget, and now you do too. Spend 500 points across six stats. Watch what you accidentally build — then make sure the drawing on your workbook page looks like the numbers feel.

Time for the best story in Pokémon design — and the most useful truth in this book.

The story first. When Atsuko Nishida was asked to design "a cute Electric-type," her first attempt looked like a daifuku — a round Japanese rice-cake sweet — with ears. Asked to make it cuter, she thought of the animal she was obsessed with at the time and rebuilt it with puffy cheeks. That animal was a squirrel. Pikachu — officially the "Mouse Pokémon," the most famous creature on planet Earth — is secretly a squirrel. (Its planned third evolution, fanged and horned Gorochu, was cut from the game. Somewhere in a drawer, Pikachu's big brother still waits.)

Now the truth. Game Freak's art director has said that roughly 5 to 10 design ideas are rejected for every Pokémon that makes it in. For one generation, the team drew 400–500 candidates to get 156 finished creatures. Read that again: the best Pokémon designers in the world throw away most of what they draw. Rejected doesn't mean bad. It means designing.

And the door isn't closed to outsiders. British artist James Turner became the first Westerner to design official Pokémon — the Vanillite ice-cream line, mighty Golurk, and the possessed teapot Polteageist. Yes: a ghost teapot is already a real Pokémon. Your weirdest idea is not too weird. And kid fans have made real cards before — a 1997 CoroCoro drawing contest printed children's art as actual trading cards, and its promo card, the Pikachu Illustrator, is now the most expensive card in history. You know that one from Battle School: $16.5 million.