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This page is incomplete! Because we need... Needs a news nav/proper split! Considering old/reddit line framing |
This page is for major project updates, related to YouTube, the site, or general archival efforts. All posts are written by me -- Lewtwo.
2025
Pokémon Red and Green Character Art Restoration
2025-02-23
Given that the site is still incomplete, you can't currently click on any images to enlarge them.
Please see the existing Asset Archive for all assets in high quality.
After nearly 30 years, I'm proud to say that we now have all Sugimori-style character artwork from the original Pokémon Red and Green completely scanned, sourced and properly adjusted in their original quality from verified sources!!
This not only marks a monumental leap in what's publicly available for the first set of Pokémon games, but even when compared to GAME FREAK's OWN personal files.
In 2016, GAME FREAK's Facebook Page posted an uncropped image of Red's character art from Pokémon Red and Green as part of their 20th Anniversary celebration— which I'll refer to as "GF Internal" from this point onwards. This was one of the few times Sugimori's art was seen as part of an original scan outside of press material, and it's a fascinating window into the state of GAME FREAK's preservation and overall art archival, unfiltered through any touchups that may have been done by The Pokémon Company or another third-party. While the overall quality was fine, being scanned from the original card material Sugimori had painted the watercolor on, the colors themselves were noticeably off. Red's entire skin tone had turned green, with all color values shifting towards overly cyan— and the white balance was direly missing several shades, including black detail that didn't match anything we'd seen before (or after) that point. Granted, the accuracy of the scan besides the colors were difficult to ascertain, as fans at the time also hadn't adequately scanned artwork of what Red was "supposed" to look like from older, existing print material at the time— meaning this largely went unnoticed by the fandom.
Unfortunately, with the October 2024 release of many of GAME FREAK's assets online, specifically the 02_人物・どうぐイラスト 02_People and items illustrations folder, it was revealed that all of their character art for Red and Green exclusively suffered from this issue. What's worse is that only the RG art seemed to be present from Generation 1, with nothing from Blue. All other Generations had perfectly scanned or well-documented digital material by GAME FREAK themselves, and while the Pokémon also weren't included in any of these folders, even the item artwork by Sugimori looked totally fine. How did this happen?
The general consensus is that GAME FREAK, at some point, scanned Sugimori's Red and Green artwork using a printer-scanner, which led to the gross green-cyan tint. It doesn't seem to be out of incompetency and moreso one of haste, given how shockingly good their other scans were. While I don't doubt they could fix this themselves with a re-scan, there's no guarantee that the colors on the physical piece itself haven't faded, or if they even still have Sugimori's original art for these characters at this point. Out of curiosity, I took GAME FREAK's Red artwork from their Facebook post, and spent a few minutes in Photoshop attempting to color-correct and level-adjust away all of the strange discrepancies to something that appeared more accurate. Something I quickly felt was that, although I could bring the values to something more typical of existing high-quality Sugimori scans that I had done in the past, it was largely off. Sadly, any attempt to correct one part of the image turned this into a game of whack-a-mole.
For instance, shifting away Red's green skin-tone to something more neutral required upping the red and magenta values for the highlights, which resulted in a slightly redder tone across all white color in the image— and this was not an isolated incident. While I was still satisfied with my quick-fix outcome, and could easily drill down harder to get a result I assumed was perfect— I felt it was best to instead seek out the original print material from the late 1990s to preserve the most accurate scans of this material to exist, for ALL characters.
As you can imagine, this was easier said than done. Working forwards from the very first release of the game, I looked to Red and Green's instruction manual, which we scanned with the help of PokémonHound earlier this year. As established in my written coverage back then, the book contained artwork of the original eight Kanto Gym Leaders, knocking a sizable chunk of characters off the list. While we don't know when these were drawn, it's cute to see Sugimori's earliest artwork of them— Sabrina's design still being that green jacket, which I noticed might've inspired the eventual Coach Trainer designs in Pokémon Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee?
The celebrations largely end there though— as the rest of the character artwork was either missing, or strangely misshapen. Professor Oak, Red and Blue in particular, (as found on Pages 3/4/5) had terribly cut-out line-art, with a faux drop-shadow applied facing the upper-left as what I can only assume was a patchwork fix. Given that the back of the book solely credits Nintendo for production, this was likely their handiwork. Likewise, the Hikeru Ka Na? scans I released earlier this year also featured Professor Oak and Red from Red and Green, but were both cropped and noticeably different in color to how they appeared in the Green manual.
[update— 2025-08-20] A similar issue to the poor manual cut-outs strangely occurs in the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team manual on Nintendo's website for the Wii U Virtual Console release— suggesting that this is indeed a problem on the publishing end!
Both are less than ideal!
So, it wasn't until PokémonHound approached me with scans of An Illustrated Book of Pocket Monsters to adjust that I got to work on the rest. It's a gargantuan book— a huge guide to all aspects of the game, with the first half dedicated to a field guide for the Pokémon, and the latter half being a walkthrough of the game's various areas. Scattered between these are art of the games' various characters— and although the Gym Leaders are nowhere to be found, Red, Blue, Professor Oak and several others appear to be present in-full— with no strange line-art edits for the very first time.
Alongside the existing characters, art of Bill and various Pokémon Trainers make their debut. Most uploads on the internet strangely label these as different images named Team Rocket Grunt, Lass, and Bug Catcher, but both this book and GAME FREAK's internal filenames label them simply as Pokémon Trainers (Japanese: トレーナーたち Trainers ).
Through adjusting all this material, I noticed that Professor Oak has a color discrepancy with his hair across different prints of the same artwork for Red and Green. Although it's shifted considerably through various designs and depictions, this specific piece is never really consistent. He does lean a light brown color in most works overall, but seeing as this disrepancy can be observed from material fresh out the box alongside existing scans of his TCG material, it's clear that some prints of Professor Oak had significantly sharper contrast in this area. What's weirder is that both Trading Card Game games for the Game Boy— _TCG_GB.png){kind=small}
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are some form of brown, but the palette was tweaked slightly in the sequel for a green background— bringing the hatching of his hair closer to GAME FREAK's lighter brown scans. Regardless it's definitely something I want to do more research into, so please reach out in the Discord if you have any English or Japanese material with this art of Oak present!
Another thing that complicated completion of the scans was artwork of Blaine. The fascinating rabbit hole of his development resulted in three pieces of artwork in the Red and Green headshot style. Prior to this we didn't know where these originated from, so once again, we worked forwards from the Red and Green manual to gain a better understanding.
Although Sugimori himself has shown that Blaine's initial design was originally that of a balding army-man, it appears that the first-known artwork of Blaine actually used his final design, in Febuary 1996 as part of the Red and Green manual. We then discovered that it wasn't until the April 1996 Guidebook where Blaine's original design was used— something that was indeed drawn with the original set but used afterwards for reasons we're not totally sure of. Internally, GAME FREAK lists the set of eight Gym Leaders (with Blaine's old design) as simply GYM LEADER (Japanese: ジムリーダー ) and a completely separate piece with his final design as GYM LEADER2— (Japanese: ジムリーダー２ ). The first eight were seemingly drawn onto the same canvas, which makes sense why the localization to Pokémon Red and Blue in the West likely resulted in that design being present in Western material, given they were sent over as one set.
What's more confusing is that another piece first seen in the December 1996 Japanese Blue manual, (where Blaine is looking to the right) was also done in this style, meaning PokémonHound had to scan from three different sources. Adjusting the scan for the Red and Green Guidebook was particularly rough— it WAS a high resolution than the others, but the paper was remarkably poor when compared to what was used for the game's manual.
RG, RG Guidebook, and the Blue Manual.
Finally, after a great deal of time, (and money spent) we've managed to have all the character artwork for Pokémon Red and Green (and Blue!!) fully scanned, sourced, and accurately adjusted. It's going to take a lot longer to gain a full set of Sugimori's other material, but more than anything I'm so glad that that this batch is finally ready for release. Once again, a huge thanks to PokémonHound for scanning the majority of material shown here for adjustment!
2024
Hikeru Ka Na? Restoration
2024-08-28
Given that the site is still incomplete, you can't currently click on any images to enlarge them.
Please see the existing Asset Archive for all assets in high quality.
The full booklet may be found here.
We've restored the original Hikeru Ka Na booklet, which contains full-body artwork for most characters in Pokémon Red and Green— including Blue, all of the Kanto Gym Leaders, and other various characters, like Lance or a Bug Catcher. As of today, this means we now have high resolution art of all Ken Sugimori character artwork for Pokémon Blue!
Hikeru Ka Na was a Japanese booklet, (published by the now retired Pikachu Records) released in 1998, with the purpose of teaching kids how to play various tunes from the original Pokémon Red and Green, gamifying it for the reader! It mostly contains sheet music alongside its illustrations, with some unique art and backgrounds. We know for certain that the blurry background art wasn't generic and absolutely representative of the world at the time, with Giovanni's page representing the seedy back-end of the Viridian City Gym, Poké Balls astrewn across the floor. This may be the earliest interpretation of the Pokémon world in 3D outside of possibly the TCG, which makes some pages like the detailed Pallet Town more interesting than we initially thought while scanning!
For technical details, these were scanned by me, from a brand new, sealed copy of the booklet that hadn't been opened by the original owner! Due to the way it was made, it was actually possible to completely de-bind the book without ruining it, letting us get the scans we need. They were done at 1200DPI, with level adjustments to bring the black and white detail to their original values.
Having all of these characters is such a big win— at the time of writing we only need a handful of character art from Pokémon Red and Green, and some from Generation 1 TCG material!
Notably, it also came with a great deal of Red and Green item artwork in high resolution. They're a part of a sticker set included alongside the CD, where the reader would stick to a separate sheet when they had "passed" a certain point in the booklet!
All the non-3D Badge artwork appears to be by Benimaru Itoh, given their first appearance in the Illustrated Book of Pocket Monsters.
Pokémon Green Manual Restoration
2024-06-03
Given that the site is still incomplete, you can't currently click on any images to enlarge them.
Please see the existing Asset Archive for all assets in high quality.
The full manual may be found here.
We've restored the original Pokémon Green manual, some of the first officially printed material for the Pokémon series. This 40-page manual included with the original Pokémon Green box contains basic instructions on how to play the game, with a variety of Pokémon and character illustrations throughout, mostly by Ken Sugimori.
All RAW scans were initially offered by PokémonHound, and subsequently uploaded to archive.org, with all pages scanned at 1200DPI. Restoration efforts (by me) include; acute color-correction applied to shift the colors away from a slight yellowing tint, to more neutral colors reflective of the original intent; level adjustments in order to properly correct the white and black-balance; and proper cropping to the very edge of the paper for each page.
Most notably, all tears, creases, and paper damage caused by age (it's 28!) were healed by-hand in order to make it appear as close to an official digital upload, as if it were scanned at the same quality in 1996. A comparison between it and the RAW can seen below!
This book contains several pieces of art that weren't released elsewhere at the time, including the Kanto Gym Leaders, as well as various items and Key Art.
Unfortunately, some of the art in the manual has strangely shifted line-art, which makes a handful of pieces unfit for general preservation. Interestingly, the doodles on both covers feature design revisions that barely made it into the final game, such as Mewtwo's shoulder plates.