Random Pokemon Generator

What this Pokemon generator gives you

A name. Useful when you want a random starter for a challenge run, a nuzlocke, a drawing prompt, or an argument.

A few of the names inside:

• Bulbasaur
• Charizard
• Gengar
• Snorlax
• Tyranitar
• Lucario
• Necrozma
• Mew

That last one should not exist. It was never in the design document, the director did not approve it, and Nintendo did not know it was there. It is the reason the whole thing worked.

Getting one

1. Press Generate for a single Pokemon.
2. Ask for six and you have a team, which is the honest way to run a random challenge.
3. Type into Contains to search the names.
4. Copy to keep your team.

Where these names come from

Names gathered and checked by hand, covering the earlier generations through the Alola era rather than every creature in the current National Pokédex. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

Three hundred bytes of empty space

Pokemon Red and Green went on sale in Japan in February 1996, and for a while it looked like they had missed their moment. The Game Boy was old. Sales were slow. Game Freak had spent years on the thing.

Near the end of development, once the debugging tools had been stripped out of the cartridge, roughly three hundred bytes of space came free. Three hundred bytes is about four lines of text. It is nothing.

A programmer called Shigeki Morimoto had been told, as everybody is told, that you do not touch the code after debugging is finished. Adding anything at that point means adding it untested, and any bug you introduce will be very hard to find, because the tools that would have found it are the very things you deleted to make room.

He did it anyway. Into those three hundred bytes he put a small pink creature, designed to be as simple as possible so that it would fit, and he did not tell the director. He did not tell Nintendo. It was a prank among a handful of people at Game Freak. The creature was Mew, and it was not obtainable, and it was not supposed to be found.

One honest footnote, because the story is repeated everywhere without it. The cartridge itself was not actually full. The game was smaller than the chip it lived on. Whether the three hundred bytes were the last space in a particular data table, or whether the tale has smoothed itself over thirty years of retelling, is not entirely clear. Morimoto has told it this way for decades, and the essential part, that Mew was slipped in at the end without permission, is not in doubt.

A rumour is a better feature than a creature

Here is what makes this more than a piece of trivia.

Satoshi Tajiri, who created the whole thing, had already wanted something like this. He had grown up on arcade games surrounded by playground rumours about secrets that might or might not exist, and he had said he wanted a character that exists but does not appear. Something for people to argue about.

Then a bug did what no marketing department could have done. Because Mew had gone in untested, an unforeseen glitch let some players actually meet it. A creature nobody had announced started turning up in people's games.

What happened next is the whole story of Pokemon. Children told other children. The rumours got wilder and more specific and completely unverifiable, because none of the people spreading them had seen it, and the few who had could not explain how. Sales did not creep up. They climbed.

Eventually Game Freak had to admit it existed. In April 1996 a comics magazine ran a competition: send in a postcard, and you might get the secret Pokemon. Seventy eight thousand people applied. Twenty won. Morimoto generated each one on his own computer and traded it, by cable, onto twenty individual cartridges that had been posted to him.

The most valuable thing in the game, for its first months alive, was a thing almost nobody could have.

The truck, and how a playground builds a myth

There is a lorry in the game. It sits near the harbour in Vermilion City, on a patch of ground you can only reach by surfing, which requires a move you do not get until much later, by which time you have no reason to go back.

It is the only object of its kind in the game. It does nothing.

Every child who saw it knew, with total certainty, that Mew was underneath it. The instructions passed around were baroque and precise. Use Strength on the truck. Do it before you fight the gym leader. Get there with exactly the right Pokemon in the lead. None of it worked, because none of it could. The truck is scenery.

The real method, when it was finally understood, was nothing anybody could have guessed from playing: an obscure sequence involving a battle, a specific escape move, and the game failing to update where it thought you were.

So the community produced an elaborate, confident, entirely false body of knowledge about a real secret. That is not stupidity. That is what people do when they know something is hidden and cannot find the door. The truck is the most honest artefact in the history of the series, because it shows you exactly what a rumour is made of.

Why you were never meant to finish it alone

The design decision underneath all of this is the one people forget.

The game shipped in two versions, and each one contained creatures the other did not. Some Pokemon would only evolve if you traded them to another person's cartridge and had them send it back. To fill the encyclopedia, you needed a friend, a cable, and a friend who was willing.

Tajiri built a game you cannot complete on your own. Not as a monetisation trick, and not as a technical accident, but because he had grown up catching insects in the fields around his town, and he had watched those fields disappear under housing, and he wanted to give children the thing he had lost: something to collect, and somebody to compare with.

The link cable is the whole design. Mew was the rumour that made people want the cable in the first place.

Questions people ask

Could you get Mew legitimately in the first games?

Only through the twenty postcard winners, and later distribution events. Otherwise the answer is no. Every other route was a glitch, which is why the game's most famous creature was, for most of its life, technically an error.

Is a random team actually playable?

Usually, and that is the interesting part. The game is generous enough that most combinations work, and the ones that do not force you to learn things you would never learn with a comfortable team. A random six is one of the best teachers available.

What is a nuzlocke?

A self-imposed rule set: a fainted Pokemon is dead and must be released, and you may only catch the first one you meet in each area. It exists because players wanted the game to have consequences. Randomness plus permanence turns a children's game into something with a pulse.

How many are there now?

More than a thousand, and the number moves with each generation. It is worth remembering that the first game had a hundred and fifty on the shelf and one in the walls, and the one in the walls is the only one anybody talked about.

References

1. Mew, on Morimoto's late addition, the glitch, and the CoroCoro distribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mew_(Pok%C3%A9mon)
2. GameSpot (2021). How Mew Saved Pokemon, quoting Morimoto's account to Satoru Iwata. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-mew-saved-pokemon/1100-6490812/
3. Bulbapedia, Pokemon Red and Green beta, including the discrepancy between the three hundred bytes account and the cartridge size. https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Red_and_Green_beta