That Pikachu was one of the Pokemon with the lowest appearance ratio in the first games was no coincidence. I discovered this recently thanks to the colleagues at VidaExtra. In a recent article, they unearthed a curious revelation from Koji Nishino, one of the game’s lead developers.
Among other things, Koji was responsible for establishing the parameters of the Pokemon, as well as different functions of the map. What many people don’t know is that the reason Pikachu was so difficult to obtain at first is his and his alone.
Well, how is that? Well, it seems that he liked the electric mouse so much that he did the ‘impossible’ to prevent many people from catching it. In a small display of ‘selfishness’ (which has now become a funny anecdote), he tried to make us not want to catch one by having to spend several hours locating it.
Pikachu and the curious whim of a Pokemon developer
In an interview that can still be found at Siliconera, Nishino talks to Ken Sugimori, the series’ illustrator, and says the following:
Nishino: This is a bit embarrassing, but I liked Pikachu so much that I had that feeling of ‘not wanting other people to have it’. At first, I even thought about just ‘hiding’ Pikachu.
Sugimoto: Compared to other Pokemon, its appearance rate was really low, which was the result of Nishino’s mysterious possessive nature.
Nishino: I thought that if its appearance rate was lower, it would work, because players wouldn’t catch it as much. However, the opposite happened: in different strategy guides and the like, texts began to be written like ‘first, catch a Pikachu’. Before I knew it, everyone had a Pikachu, so my plan went completely wrong…
So yes, the reason you had to spend hours on this little electric mouse is because of a somewhat capricious developer who didn’t want to share his favorite Pokemon with the rest of the players. Things didn’t go well for him, as Sugimoto revealed.
To give you an idea, the percentage of Pikachu’s appearance in its first area of appearance (Viridian Forest) is only 5%, so it was really difficult to casually walk around and find it. You had to look for it, usually intentionally.
In the second area, the Power Plant, it was somewhat easier, as it rose to 25%. However, this was only in Pokemon Red, Pokemon Green and Pokemon Blue, as in Pokemon Yellow we could get one right at the start. Then it did not appear in the wild, but we all had access to it.