Game-Art-HQ

Welcome to the first Pokémon Fan Collaboration on Game-Art-HQ!

We caught all 151 Pokémon (and MissingNo.) from the first Generation of Pokémon games (Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow) set in the Kanto Region.  Fans from around the world shared their love for Pokémon by illustrating the unique attacks and abilities of monsters such as Pikachu, Mewtwo, Bulbasaur, Porygon and all the other first Generation Pokémon. With 300+ artworks provided by over 150 artists, this is our tribute to the creators of Pokémon, one of the greatest and most enduring video games series of the last 20 years.

Different from other Game-Art-HQ Art Collaborations that often feature highly detailed characters and backgrounds, the task this time was to focus on the Pokémon themselves and their unique attacks.

More than 150 artists participated in this Pokémon 20th Anniversary Tribute, many of whom were first-time participants in Game-Art-HQ tributes, and most artists drew more than one Pokémon.

The Pokémon 20th Anniversary Tribute has a grand total of 152 galleries with two artworks per Pokémon in each gallery.

They also contain the artists’ thoughts and descriptions about the Pokémon series, their illustrated Pokémon, and the Pokémon’s abilities.

Enjoy viewing the 300+ artworks and learn more about the Pokémon and their attacks!

And don’t forget: You gotta catch’em all!

We sorted the Pokémon as listed in the official Kanto Region Pokédex:

Did you know that the main inspiration for Satoshi Tajiri, creator of the Pokémon series, was his hobby collecting and studying insects when he was young?

Satoshi “Dr Bug” Tajiri 

His hobby earned him the nickname “Dr. Bug” among his peers. Many years later, he saw children playing Game Boy together with the Link Cable and he imagined insects crawling from one Game Boy to the other. That’s how the idea for Pokémon came together. Satoshi Tajiri is still the CEO of Game Freak 20 years after the debut of Pokémon.

While the Pokémon for our Tribute were drawn by many different artists, the official illustrations are all drawn by a single person. 

Meet Ken Sugimori, a friend of Satoshi Tajiri who worked with him on Game Freak magazine many years before Pokémon came together.

He illustrated all of the different Pokémon as well as the majority of the human characters in the series. Did you know that Ash Ketchum’s name is Satoshi and Tracy Sketit is called Kenji in the original Japanese version of the Pokémon anime series?

Our Pokémon Art Collaboration was announced on April 29th, 2016, but we had already planned to create something Pokémon-related for over 2 years.

Ideas ranged from artworks in the Pokémon card format where full backgrounds would be needed to illustrate fight scenes between Pokémon or a project with the topic of illustrating the background stories of Pokémon games.

In the end, we thought it would be best to do a tribute for the Pokémon 20th Anniversary and get all Gen I Pokémon drawn with a focus on displaying their different attacks and abilities.

The project at first was meant to be all about the 20th Anniversary of Pokémon covering the entire series, but many artist requests prompted us to rebrand it as being focused on just Generation I with the other Generations to follow later on as a sort of giant Pokédex project. Stay tuned! 🙂

100 of the 303 Pokémon Art spots were taken on May 13th, 2016, just two weeks after our Pokémon project was announced, making it the fastest growing GA-HQ Art Collaboration in our history so far. The final spot, the 2nd move for Dugtrio, was claimed by Ra-ooo on September 23rd.

We decided to publish this project on Christmas as a big gift by and for the Pokémon fan community worldwide and will continue with Gen II in April 2017 with Christmas 2017 targeted as the publication date. 

Special credit belongs to new staff member Shinragod, who helped us out with many of the descriptions for Pokemon and their moves!