HD Scans of Original Pokémon Art Reveal the Art We’ve Had for Decades Was All Wrong

If you’re of a certain age range, the original Ken Sugimori Pokémon Red and Blue creature art is probably seared into your brain — but new HD scans of that art reveal that the versions of the art we have been seeing for decades are actually a wrong and weak representation of that original art. Archivist and Twitter user Lewtwo has, with legitimate art scans provided by Christopher Wells from the Japanese Pokémon Gold and Silver guidebook, demonstrated to the world that the genuine original art has a much richer and way different color palette than the Pokémon Red and Blue art we are used to seeing.

According to Lewtwo, much of the original Pokémon art we have seen for years comes from an official North American 1998 Pokémon player’s guide, and the color schemes for all the Pokémon are heavily washed out there. For decades, players had assumed this was a conscious artistic choice, but by cross-referencing their own scans with other official materials (like Pokémon card art that uses the original art), Lewtwo determined that this is not true.

In fact, these new ultra-high-resolution scans demonstrate a great amount of extra detail in the hand-painted creatures, and you could spend a lot of time just poring over each one. The differences in color scheme alone are startling in some spots, with Ivysaur’s skin shifting from blue to green in the new scan, (Though Ivysaur’s colors have been somewhat variable over the years, as Lewtwo notes.) and Tauros has gone from washed-out orange to very apparent shades of brown. It makes you wonder just how rough a scanning and printing process that 1998 player’s guide was.

For over 20 years, the Red, Blue, Gold & Silver artwork of each Pokemon across the internet had inaccurate colors, were often misshapen, and generally VERY low quality.

Thanks to scans provided by @ExcaliburZero_Z, we're finally able to see how they were always meant to look. pic.twitter.com/aCTYVzC0DZ

— Lewtwo (@Lewchube) April 17, 2023

Woke up to some really charged tweets, so here's a big post for those that are concerned.

[1] The existing low-quality scans of the RB/GS artwork aren't being "deleted from history" or becoming "lost media."

Bulbapedia allows you to see previous reversions of every image… pic.twitter.com/PZoso1PbhD

— Lewtwo (@Lewchube) April 18, 2023

i got u pic.twitter.com/Jb7iQG5Jqi

— Lewtwo (@Lewchube) April 18, 2023

this is like when you beat a stage in sonic generations pic.twitter.com/Ff1YvFQYYd

— Lewtwo (@Lewchube) April 17, 2023

The plan from here for Lewtwo is to get all of this legitimate, higher-resolution original art isolated from its scanned backgrounds and placed on Bulbapedia, a major Pokémon wiki — but the old, wrong Pokémon Red and Blue art scans will still remain easily accessible on the internet too. There are no concerns of “history” being erased, even if that history was off the mark in the first place. Lewtwo also plans to put the raw scans for the Gold and Silver guidebook on Archive.org eventually. In any case, let us know what you think of these colorful discoveries.