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In a series of tweets yesterday, Game Freak employee James Turner revealed a sneak preview of a new educational manga recently released in Japan, detailing the history of Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri, and information from the early days at Game Freak.

https://twitter.com/JamesTurner_42/status/996888188319813633)

The book, called 'Satoshi Tajiri: The Man Who Created Pokémon', was written for Japanese elementary school children, and will be the first in a series of comics that introduces kids to historical figures. A photo tweeted by Turner shows a page of previously unseen Pokémon concepts from Red and Blue – despite claims that most of the documentation about the first two Pokémon games either never existed, or was lost in time. 

One of the panels seen in the image contains an internal poll used during development of the games – with Exeggutor listed as the winner, claiming 23 votes. According to Resetera user ERAsaur, the unreleased Pokémon in the image include: Deer (56), [Obscured]-ro (61), Crocky (62), Cactus (67), and Jagg (68).

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Interestingly, the numbers shown on the sheet also appear to match the internal index order for Pokémon Red and Blue: showing that every unused Pokémon in the image turned into a ‘MissingNo.’ This suggests that these Pokémon may have been cut in the middle of game development.

However, we have since seen crocodile, cactus and deer-like Pokémon in later generations of the games – so it’s likely that these concepts were the inspiration behind them. For those interested in digging deeper into Pokémon history, the manga is now available on Amazon Japan.

Do you think we’ll continue to see Game Freak utilising older assets in new iterations of Pokémon? Do you plan to get your hands on a copy of the book? Let us know in the comments below…

[source resetera.com, via tcrf.net]