Old Pokémon art has been ‘wrong’ for years
The Pokémon art we’ve been looking at from Pokémon Red and Blue and Pokémon Gold and Silver has been inaccurately presented for decades, according to a Pokémon archivist who goes by the name Lewtwo online.
Before game developers published press kits with digital artwork online, game art was more commonly presented to the public through print — manuals, strategy guides, advertisements. To get it online, artwork had to be scanned and digitized. This is how Pokémon designer and lead artist Ken Sugimori’s watercolor Pokémon paintings eventually made their way online, scanned in from places like Nintendo Power’s Pokémon Red and Blue Player’s Guide from 1998.
But it turns out these scans were actually not totally accurate. Lewtwo said the images from those guides had blown out color and artwork that was often stretched out or distorted. But it was what people had, and it existed online as the “official” Pokémon art on fan websites for decades. But that’s changing, thanks to Lewtwo’s effort and software developer Christopher Wells’ scans.
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Lewtwo and others are working to upload high-quality scans for the original 251 Pokémon, preserving Sugimori’s artwork with as much accuracy as possible. Wells scanned in the images from a Japanese Pokémon guidebook for Pokémon Gold and Silver; the process took roughly 10 hours over a single weekend, he told Polygon. It’s not as simple as slapping the booklet down on a scanner. To get as little warping as possible, Wells unbound the guidebook, using a heat gun to melt the glue that held the book’s pages together — “a somewhat long process, requiring a good bit of patience to properly separate the pages without having the glue drip onto any pages,” Wells said. Then, he could scan in
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