Pokémon

Every so often, Nostalgic Worlds is going to look at a different Pokémon and investigate their inspirations (whether biological, mythological, or otherwise), their place in the Pokémon world, and a bit about their in-game physiology and behaviour. In truth, most of the Pokémon I examine will probably be from Generations I through IV, since that is the era I’m most familiar with and remember most fondly. But I’ve played pretty much every mainline Pokémon game and found some of the later Pokémon designs to be just as interesting as earlier ones, so I’m sure more recent additions to the franchise will sometimes make an appearance. I debated whether to start with Pokémon #001 in the Pokédex, Bulbasaur, but I thought that might mislead readers into thinking this series would go in numbered order and cover every single Pokémon in sequence (a monumental task I’m not willing to commit to). So instead, I decided to start with undoubtedly the most famous Pokémon of all, the mascot of the entire franchise: Pikachu.

In the late ’90s, I didn’t know anyone under the age of 12 who managed to escape Pokémon’s gravitational pull. You collected Pokémon cards, watched the cartoon, and/or played the Game Boy games. Most kids did all three. I certainly did. I begged my parents for a Game Boy, specifically to play Pokémon. I pored over magazines to learn their names, attacks, and the levels at which they evolved. And whatever magazine or book I found, Pikachu was almost always there on the cover, usually taking centre stage.

Pikachu has saturated the market for so long and to such an extent that, at this point, there might not be much to say that hasn’t already been covered many times over. Nonetheless, Pikachu’s creation is interesting and worthy of note, as is the fact that it was never intended to become Pokémon’s mascot in the first place! But more on that in a moment.

First of all, what exactly is Pikachu? Well, simply put, it’s a cute, yellow, electric rodent with long, pointed ears and a lightning-bolt-shaped tail. It generates electricity from the air and stores it in its round red cheek pouches. During battle – or if its tail is grabbed – Pikachu can use the electricity it has stored to zap its assailant. It also uses electricity in other ways. For example, when Pikachu meet, they may touch their tails together and exchange electricity as a form of greeting; or they can recharge a fellow Pikachu that is in a weakened state. If several Pikachu gather, their electricity builds up and they can cause lightning storms.

Pikachu was created about halfway through the development of Pokémon Red and Green¹ to bring more balance to the fledgling Pokémon universe. The earliest Pokémon were initially designed as tough-looking beasts, since battling is arguably the primary focus of the games. But lead Pokémon designer Ken Sugimori soon realised that the world needed some ‘cute’ Pokémon as well, to encourage other aspects of the game beyond battling, such as collecting and trading. Struggling to come up with suitable designs (which he attributed to his male perspective), Sugimori brought in female Game Freak staff to join the development team. Illustrator Atsuko Nishida was tasked with developing what would become Pikachu and its evolutionary line. She was given specific guidelines to work with: the Pokémon was to be an Electric-type, it should evolve twice, and its final evolution should look ‘strong’. Initially, Nishida’s creation resembled a daifuki, a small, round Japanese rice cake stuffed with sweet filling, which is often decorated and moulded to resemble a cute animal with simple features. This early daifuku design had ears but no distinction between the head and body.

After being told that it needed to look cuter by programmer Koji Nishino (Pokémon’s ‘cuteness supervisor’), Atsuko moved away from the dumpling design (which was erased and no longer exists²) and decided to base the Pokémon on a squirrel instead. ‘At the time, I was obsessed with squirrels,’ Nishida recalls, in an interview about Pikachu’s creation. ‘I didn’t own a squirrel, but I wanted to because I thought its movement was comical. It was here that I was inspired to make Pikachu store electricity in its cheek pouches. When hamsters store food, their entire body puffs up, but with squirrels, it’s just their cheeks.’

Every time Nishida submitted the design, however, she was told by Koji Nishino to make it even cuter, which she found frustrating. She made the Pokémon a little chubbier, its cheek pouches bigger, and its eyes a little bigger, until the design was finally approved. Like many Pokémon at the time, it was initially created using large pixels on a computer screen rather than being hand-drawn (Ken Sugimori would later draw the illustrated versions after the sprite art had been finalised, to make any last-minute changes and give all the Pokémon a unified look). Since the Game Boy lacked colour due to its limited hardware, the Pokémon created in the mid-90s were designed to be easily expressed in black and white. This is why Pikachu has two dark stripes on its back. According to Nishida, this pattern doesn’t really mean anything, but since you always see the back of your Pokémon on the screen during battles, she figured it would be better to put something there rather than have it be perfectly smooth.

Towards the end of development, it was decided that the games should be compatible with a new peripheral called the Super Game Boy, which would let players play the Game Boy on their TVs. This hardware made it possible to add just one colour to each Pokémon, which would be black and white on the Game Boy. It was at this point that each Pokémon was given ‘an attribute colour that [expressed] the Pokémon’s type in a way that is easy to grasp’, according to Ken Sugimori. This led to the use of yellow in Pikachu’s official art, since the colour – not to mention the distinctive lightning-bolt-shaped tail – nicely emphasises Pikachu’s Electric-type.

In addition to designing Pikachu, Atsuko Nishida also came up with its name. It is a combination of two Japanese onomatopoeia words: pika (a sparkling sound; the expression of light flashing in Japanese³) and chū, a sound a mouse makes (like ‘squeak’ in English). Nishida admits that she wasn’t actually thinking of a mouse in particular, but simply chose it because ‘it sounded good’. She adds that ‘Pikachu is not particularly mouse-shaped, and a Mouse Pokémon named Rattata already existed, so I actually hadn’t intended to make it a mouse.’ Making Pikachu a Mouse Pokémon happened after the fact. It was Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of the Pokémon franchise, who later made that decision.

As Pokémon Red and Green were nearing completion, Ken Sugimori printed out the completed dot drawings of all the planned Pokémon and asked Game Freak staff members which one they liked best. In this survey, Pokémon were evaluated simply on their appearance, since their in-game abilities were still under development. The overwhelming winner of this survey was Pikachu, and it was chosen as one of 15 Pokémon to have its official artwork featured in the game instruction manual.

Even so, Pikachu wasn’t viewed as the game’s mascot at this point, and neither was any other Pokémon for that matter – simply because Game Freak wasn’t thinking of Pokémon as a potentially global franchise. It was only when it became apparent to the team that Pokémon was going to be BIG that they began considering the possibility of choosing and promoting a Pokémon that would essentially represent the entire series. One Pokémon that was seriously considered was Clefairy. I’ll talk more about this in a future article, but the ‘problem’ with Clefairy, from a marketing standpoint, was that its design would primarily appeal to female gamers.

Pikachu, on the other hand, seemed popular with everyone, boys and girls, and upon the release of Pokémon Green and Red in Japan, it appeared frequently on Pokémon merchandise. Partly, its popularity was due to its cute appearance, but also because there was an element of mystery surrounding it – Pikachu is difficult to find in Generation I, with a low appearance rate. This is supposedly because Koji Nishino, upon seeing Pikachu’s final design, thought that it looked too cool to be common. Pikachu can, in fact, be found very early on in the game, in Viridian Forest – it’s the first rare Pokémon that players can conceivably catch. But because this is an area primarily inhabited by Pokémon based on everyday rats, bugs, and birds, and since the odds of running into Pikachu are very low, first-time players might not even realise these electric rodents live in Viridian Forest unless they get lucky. But shortly after the games were released in Japan, word soon got out about the elusive Pikachu and, of course, everybody wanted one, with articles on where and how to catch it appearing in strategy guides (remember, we’re still in the mid-90s at this point, before the internet had taken off).

When Pokémon was being turned into an animated TV series, the director, Kunihiko Yuyama, felt that Ash’s partner should not be one of the three starter Pokémon (Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Squirtle) available to pick at the start of the game. He didn’t want to highlight one starter Pokémon over the others by giving it a more prominent role in the show. Making Charmander Ash’s partner, for example, could have potentially alienated children who had chosen Squirtle.

Masakazu Kubo, a member of the anime’s development team, states that a ‘checklist’ was involved in making the final choice. The criteria required a warm design, a non-threatening colour, a face that could convey emotion, a vocalisation easily pronounceable by children, and, of course, a cute appearance. Pikachu possessed all of these. What is more, the anime team believed that children would see Pikachu as a more familiar and intimate ‘pet’ than most other Pokémon and so would be more likely to buy merchandise featuring it because of a desire to have it in their own home.

Thanks to its portrayal in the anime, Pikachu’s popularity soon soared to new heights. Not only did the show raise Pikachu’s profile, but it also expanded its character, giving it a personality that couldn’t be conveyed in the video games alone. Pikachu’s Electric attacks are also better visualised in the show. Seeing moves like Thunder Shock in action on the television screen is much more impactful than seeing them on the pocket-sized Game Boy. When the Pokémon games were being prepared for a western release, Pikachu was already extremely popular with Japanese audiences – and it was assumed that the rest of the world would also latch on to this little yellow electric rodent. So, whereas most Pokémon were given different names in different languages during the localisation process, Pikachu’s name remained untranslated. It may be a meaningless, nonsensical word to non-Japanese people, but its global use enabled Pikachu to be trademarked worldwide.

As you may have noticed by comparing the older Pikachu illustrations scattered throughout this article to the current artwork at the top of the page, Pikachu used to be much plumper and squatter. Ken Sugimori has admitted that the TV series influenced his later Pikachu art. Since the anime had Pikachu performing a variety of movements, including human-like gestures, Sugimori changed the Pokémon’s body shape to make ‘acting’ easier. Pikachu has been refined over the years to have a more defined neck, a slimmer waist, bigger cheek pads, and a straighter spine. The original design has been lovingly nicknamed ‘Fat Pikachu’ by fans.

Pokémon Sword and Shield, released in 2019, introduced the concept of Dynamaxing and Gigantamaxing to the franchise. Whereas Pokémon that Dynamax grow in size and strength, Pokémon that Gigantamax also change their appearance, if only briefly, as they become suffused with extreme power. Only a few Pokémon are capable of Gigantamaxing, so it’s unsurprising that the most famous Pokémon of all would be included in that list.

Pikachu has never received a regional form in any of the Pokémon games, probably because people like what Pikachu already looks like. It has such a well-known, iconic design that making it look different would likely be a mistake. But giving Pikachu a Gigantamax form works because a) Gigantamaxing usually doesn’t change the Pokémon that much; b) it’s only temporary; and c) Gigantamax Pikachu pays homage to its classic look, with softer curves and a bigger belly. Yes, after 20 years or so, ‘Fat Pikachu’ has returned!

As you can see from its official artwork above, Gigantamax Pikachu is a much larger, squishier version of Pikachu that stomps around with a mindless smile on its face. It has power equal to that of an entire power plant, making it feel like an adorable but unstoppable giant. Its tail has become much longer and now stores all of the electricity that it generates, causing it to glow brightly like a neon sign. When it smashes its opponents with that long, bolt-shaped tail, Gigantamax Pikachu delivers a surge of electricity equivalent to a lightning strike.

One final Pikachu I would like to mention is the one from Pokémon’s first live-action movie, Detective Pikachu, released in 2019 (based on a 2018 spinoff game of the same name). As the film’s title suggests, it features Pikachu in a starring (and talking) role, voiced by Ryan Reynolds. It also caused a debate over a seemingly trivial question: Does Pikachu have fur?

While the cartoon version of the beloved Pokémon has a smooth exterior, the film adaptation shows Pikachu covered in yellow fur, worn thin in some places and scruffily overgrown in others. Some fans were not pleased, but for the film’s visual effects supervisor, Erik Nordby, the answer was obvious. ‘How can it not be furry?’ he asks. ‘It would be this hard-surfaced yellow thing – the most disturbing thing in the world.’

Solving the anatomical oddities of fictional creatures that have been drawn in one specific way for two decades understandably proved difficult for the filmmakers. The process saw more than 1,000 digital artists worldwide working for three years through trial and error, all against a backdrop of ceaseless debate. Given its venerated status in pop culture, the team spent an inordinate amount of time on Pikachu. It was paramount that the visual effects artists did not damage the image of this iconic Pokémon. His vibrantly yellow fur grew, shrank, and fluctuated in colour as the design changed. The Pokémon Company initially wanted Pikachu to have sheeny, short fur like a horse. But Erik Nordby felt that would give the impression of no fur at all. ‘If it’s going to have a sense of kawaii [a Japanese term that conveys cuteness and charm], there has to be a level of fur,’ he says. The team started with short, matted-down fur, like a pug’s, but it ended up feeling greasy and oily. So they finally settled on a hybrid between a coon cat, a pug, and a red fox.

It’s easy to assume that Pokémon peaked in the late 90s and early 00s, when it first broke through into pop culture, but the franchise has maintained its popularity over the decades – in no small part thanks to Pikachu. This lovable little rodent still holds a special place in our hearts, 25 years after its debut. Some Pokémon fans, it’s fair to say, are a bit sick of Pikachu by now, but it cannot be denied that, as a mascot chosen to represent the series as a whole, Pikachu is a pretty good choice. It’s cute, appealing, easy to recognise, and highly marketable – just as a good children’s cartoon character should be – but it also embodies the series’ larger themes of friendship and loyalty. Even my granddad knows who and what Pikachu is – and I don’t think I could say that about any other Pokémon.

Next time, I will look at Pikachu’s evolution, Raichu, along with its regional form – and the mysterious second evolution that this Pokémon family was initially supposed to have…

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1. Pokémon Red and Green were the very first Pokémon games released, on 27 February 1996. The original idea was to make seven versions in all rainbow colours, but Game Freak ended up with just two (red and green, because of Mario and Luigi). ↩︎
2. Pikachu’s black-tipped ears are a vestige from Atsuko Nishida’s very early daifuki design. ↩︎
3. In an English comic book, when someone is zapped by electricity, the caption might read ‘zzzt’ or ‘zapp’, but in Japan, it would say ‘pikapika’. ↩︎