Game Freak’s Shigeki Morimoto on Mew – why it was initially rare, design, more

Game Freak uploaded a video this week with Shigeki Morimoto, the original designer for Mew. While it’s unfortunately only in Japanese at present, Siliconera translated some of the more notable tidbits.

Here’s the full roundup:

– Mew was first released to 20 players via CoroCoro in 1996
– Second distribution for 100 people happened later on
– The small amount was because each Mew was procedurally generated on Morimoto’s PC
– They each had different Pokemon IDs
– He had to trade it to each chosen player one by one via Link Cable
– The third distribution in Japan happened at World Hobby Fair
– Morimoto would later have a hand in planning the Old Sea Map event that would lead players to catch Mew on Faraway Island in Pokemon Emerald, which he was the director of
– When Morimoto first went to see Mewtwo Strikes Back, he was in complete amazement of Mew actually moving around, especially since he created Mew’s design
– Mew’s movements were decided on by the anime animators, as they would be working on the original 2D pixel art only
– Nowadays, they design Pokemon with the intent of turning them into 3D models, so the designers have a hand in saying what the animations will look like
– Because of this, they’ll draw Pokemon from various angles
– Mew was designed off Mewtwo’s design
– Morimoto designed Mew to be a simpler version of Mewtwo’s design, and this was mostly so that Mew would take up less space on the cartridge