Bulbasaur Wasn’t the First Pokémon Designed — Rhydon Was

Bulbasaur is number 001, so people reasonably assume it came first. It did not. The first Pokémon Game Freak ever designed was Rhydon, and once you know that, the original games stop looking like a coincidence.

The statues

Walk into a gym in Red and Blue and there is a statue. Walk into the Pewter Museum, or plenty of other buildings, and there is the same statue. It is Rhydon — not Pikachu, not the starters, not the legendary bird on the box art. The mascot species of the entire franchise is standing in the corner of the room while a Rhydon statue takes the plinth.

That is what a first design looks like in a finished game. When the team needed a generic "a Pokémon" shape to decorate the world with, they reached for the one that had existed longest and felt most like the default.

The numbers underneath

The national dex order is a presentation choice, made late and arranged by evolutionary family. Underneath it, the first games carry a separate internal index — the order the game engine actually stores species in — and that order does not match the dex at all. Rhydon sits at index 001 in it.

So there are two numbering systems in the same cartridge. One is the catalogue players see, and one is the residue of the order things were made in. Rhydon is 112 in the first and 1 in the second.

Why Rhydon, of all things

It makes sense once you look at it. Rhydon is a heavy, armoured, kaiju-shaped animal with a drill on its nose — the design language of the monster movies and tokusatsu the team grew up on, rather than the softer, rounder look the series later became famous for. It is what a monster-collecting game looked like before anyone knew it would be marketed to children with a yellow mouse on the front.

You can see the whole series argue with itself through the Gen I roster. Rhydon and Nidoking on one side, Jigglypuff and Clefairy on the other. The design that came first is the one that looks least like the brand.

The bit that gets me

Millions of people walked past those statues, in gym after gym, for years. It was never a secret and it was never hidden. The first Pokémon ever drawn was standing in the entrance hall of nearly every important building in the game, and almost nobody looked up at it.