Dr Lava
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Pokemon Art Director Deletes Development Info... Because of Me >_<
🕑 Added 2019-12-27 10:48:23 +0000 UTCWell, I'm used to covering Lost Pokemon History... but this is the first time Pokemon History BECAME lost because of me.
On December 15, I went through the entire Twitter history of James Turner, the current Pokemon series art director. I was looking for development details and information about design inspirations, and I found some really good stuff amongst James' 3700 tweets. How Guzzlord's design was inspired by HP Lovecraft monsters and Guardians of the Galaxy villain Agrajag, that Naganadel was inspired by the Xenomorph from the Alien movies... lots of good stuff, pulled from 41 tweets. Check out the 3 photos attached to this post.
On December 17, I posted quotes from 3 of these tweets. The next day, James deleted 96 of his old tweets, including everything I'd recorded just a few days earlier. So it appears that right after I spent a whole afternoon combing through James' twitter history copying down development info, he spent an afternoon of his own combing through the same tweets... and deleting all of it.
Fortunately, I've still got all that info recorded. As a courtesy, I tweeted James to ask if he'd prefer I not share any more of it. I know James saw my question and knows who I am -- not only because he deleted all those tweets, but because he's retweeted me twice this month. But the Pokemon company has pretty strict policies about answering the questions of non-approved folks like myself -- so as I expected, James didn't respond to my question.
After thinking it over, I decided to put all this deleted development info into an article, then into a video in the near future. Now that it appears I'm the only person who has access to it, I think it's important to preserve it. I'd already tweeted about 1/5 of the quotes by the time I realized what had happened, but I think I should treat the rest of it a bit more carefully. Anyway, I thought y'all might enjoy hearing about this. Cheers.
Comments
HabaneroPeppers
Sorry to hear that. I'd seen this before but it deserved a reaction. Keep doing what you are doing. People will love this for a long time.
Joey Keilholz
Pokemon is deeply original to the point that all our designers have been kept in quarantine since birth
Dr Lava
I think probably Game Freak higher-ups came along and were like, "You can't be giving out information at the design process. And you DEFINITELY can't say you based Pokemon on other people's work, like Alien and Hitchhiker's Guide!"
Reoko
God damn, the pokemon beta scene has been gettin fuckin crazy lately. And the worst part is hardly anyone is talking about any of this. In 10-20 years, this info will become invaluable.
Joey Keilholz
I....I don’t get it. Why would he delete things he put into the world willingly because someone mentioned them later? Makes about as much sense as Nintendo’s abuse of DMCA to avoid free advertisement.
