Archivists are working to correct decades of ‘wrong’ Pokémon art

Pokemon art we’ve seen pokemon red and blue and pokemon gold and Silver It’s been inaccurately presented for decades, according to Pokémon archivists someone named ryutsu online.

Before game developers published press kits containing digital artwork online, it was common for game art to be exposed to the public through printed materials (manuals, strategy guides, advertisements). I had to scan and digitize the artwork to get it online. This is how the watercolor Pokemon drawings of Pokemon His designer and lead his artist Ken Sugimori finally made it online and were scanned from places like Nintendo Power. Pokemon Red/Blue Player’s Guide Since 1998.

However, it turned out that these scans weren’t actually entirely accurate: Lewtwo said the images in these guides often blew away colors and artwork that were stretched or distorted. That’s it. But that’s what people had, and it existed online as “official” Pokemon art on fan websites for decades. That is changing. Christopher WellsScan.

Lewtwo and others have worked to upload high-quality scans of the original 251 Pokémon, preserving Sugimori’s artwork as accurately as possible.Wells scanned an image from a Japanese Pokemon guidebook pokemon gold and Silverthe process took about 10 hours over one weekend, he told Polygon. It’s not as easy as slamming a booklet into the scanner. To minimize warping, Wells unbound the guidebook and used a heat gun to melt the glue that held the book’s pages together. on any page. said Wells. after thathe scanned each of the flat pages and lined them with black paper to prevent the other side of the page from bleeding into the scanned image.

You can easily see the difference in color saturation when comparing a newly scanned image with an old one. Wells said he scanned the images at 12000 dpi — very high quality, so many beautiful details that were previously unnoticeable were conveyed in the scanned images, and a very talented hand made these images. It reminds me of what I drew.

The Joltean and Vaporean images are a striking example of this. There is a variation in line thickness that is not often seen in digital media. Some may consider this incomplete. You can see the flowers where paint and water intersect, and the parts that Sugimori drew a little outside the lines. Lewtwo said he believes this is “the closest to being able to scan the original work.”

“Sugimori’s watercolor art really stands out among many official video game art these days, especially for the amount of detail and human imperfection that reminds us that all the art we admire is made by humans. “It stands out with some official scans that we can see. We can aspire to learn and make equally impressive creative works,” said Wells. It’s quite impressive that even the altered version of .

Lewtwo takes over and adds the newly scanned image to his file. Pokemon Asset Archive We help upload images to wiki sites such as Bulbapedia. Artwork already stored there will not be deleted, he stressed. Accessible from the list of previous revisions. This is important because even these “wrong” scans are part of Pokemon history and the versions of Pokemon that have come to be loved in the eyes and hearts of many fans. , the images are cropped from the scans in Pokedex order and uploaded to the archive.

Saving is important. Pokémon is a major cultural touchstone, and like other media like books, it’s important to understand its history. Artwork is essential for that as well as preserving it in both physical and digital formats. The problem with physically preserving things is finding and obtaining those materials and reproducing their accuracy in digital files. But even if media production continues to rely heavily on digital delivery and becomes less dependent on physicality, it doesn’t mean companies are interested in preserving their history. Lewtwo already has his assets and trailer ready for promotion. Pokemon Legends: Arceus and pokemon scarlet and violet It seems to have been removed from the official sources. Saving never stops, whether it’s new content or old content.

“To have something that is almost 20 years old for the first time in essentially perfect quality is a big deal. We do,” Lewtwo told Polygon.