Whether you've been a Pokemon fan since its inception or you've become one along the way and gone back to look at some of the early artwork, you may have noticed some of the initial designs differed from what the Pokemon actually looked like. Turns out the changes in color and sometimes even shape of the Pokemon were never intended. The original designs have now been discovered and will gradually be used to replace the miscolored images in the asset archive.Pokemon archivist shared the news on Twitter, using the miscolored design of Diglett and comparing it to the newly discovered high-quality version to showcase the difference. The collection of designs includes better-looking versions of every Pokemon artist Ken Sugimori helped design, so all 251 from the first two generations. You can see below just how striking the difference is, making the original Diglett image a far deeper shade of brown, so the color Diglett is actually supposed to be. is the person responsible for recovering the original images and Lewchube and their team will now begin the process of preparing them so they can replace the low-quality pictures that have existed for the past 25 years. That will be an arduous process, hence Diglett, Tauros, and Ivysaur being the only on🐠es showcased in the Twitter thread below. Already concrete ꦑevidence that all of the pictures are going to look far more accurate once the project is done.
A lot of you have que⛄ries about the newly discovered images. Lewchube has assured those worried about the blown-out versions that they won't be wiped from existence. Reversions on Bulbapedia will still allow you to see them.ꩲ Others have questioned the legitimacy of the images, but Lewchube points to the original designs of certain Pokemon cards that clearly include them, giving Ivysaur and Tauros cards as examples.
The miscolored versions appear to have shown up for the first time in a Red & Blue guide published in Nintendo Power. Why those images then became the norm and have existed online all this time is unclear. It makes sense that a published format is the first place they showed up though as the images were likely scanned for use in the magazine and, since it was 1998, the quality of the pictures took a serious hit. A big year for unseen Pokemon designs as a former artist previously shared pictures of 🍸🥂their unused legendaries.