Game Freak’s Shigeki Morimoto On Mew’s Rareness, Simple Design, And More

A recent video on Game Freak’s official Youtube channel gives some new details on Mew, including the first events to receive the Pokemon and more, from its original designer, Shigeki Morimoto.

Here are the highlights;

• Originally, Mew was only released to 20 players via CoroCoro in 1996, with a second distribution to 100 people happening later on. Why so little? Because each Mew was procedurally generated on Morimoto’s PC, even having different Pokemon IDs, and he had to trade it to each chosen player one by one via Link Cable. The third distribution in Japan happened at World Hobby Fair.

• Morimoto would later have a hand in planning the Old Sea Map event that would lead players to catch Mew on Faraway Island in Pokemon Emerald, which he was the director of.

• When Morimoto first went to see Mewtwo Strikes Back, he was in complete amazement of Mew actually moving around, especially since he created Mew’s design. However, Mew’s movements were decided on by the anime animators, as they would be working on the original 2D pixel art only. Nowadays, they design Pokemon with the intent of turning them into 3D models, so the designers have a hand in saying what the animations will look like. To this end, they’ll draw Pokemon from various angles.

• Mew was designed off Mewtwo’s design, which sounds confusing considering Mewtwo is created from Mew in the Pokemon world. Morimoto designed Mew to be a simpler version of Mewtwo’s design, and this was mostly so that Mew would take up less space on the cartridge.

Check out the full video below:

Pokemon Red and Blue released on Game Boy.