You may have assumed the person who designed Pokemon's iconic blue and yellow logo was a Nintendo employee, working on the word for months, even years. But, it was actually an American artist brought on to salvage the brand just a month before its E3 1998 reveal.
27 years after making the logo, Chris Maple is finally going public. "The task was both exciting and challenging," he writes on his website, where he's shared some T-shirt mockups with one of his early versions of the design.
Maple received a call from Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa's secretary and travelled to the company's Redmond office to hear what it wanted from him. "[Arakawa] introduced himself and said that they're going to be launching a game officially in the United States and Europe," Maple tells IGN. "Only problem is, the prior agencies they've tried out for the situation didn't quite hit the mark, and they burnt the budget and time element."
So, he only had a month to create what is now known worldwide as the Pokemon logo. He was given "toys and pieces of paper and weird drawings and things all in front of me on the table" to use as references. "I go, 'What is this?' And he goes, 'It's a Pocket Monster,'" Maple recalls. "And I said, 'Oh, what's a Pocket Monster?’' He goes, 'It's Pokemon. We're going to call it Pokemon.'"
Maple didn't play the games, he just knew that Pokemon Blue was coming to the West with a Yellow version to follow sometime later, and that may have influenced his decision to make the logo the color it is today. Ultimately, he settled on his final design because of the "energy in it."
When he showed it to the Nintendo executives, the room was quiet for a while. "And then Don James [former Nintendo of America executive VP of operations] speaks up and says, 'I believe this is the one,'" Maple says. "Arakawa's just sitting there. He goes, 'Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay.' And Lance [Barr, former Nintendo of America designer] gets up and leaves and Gail [Tilden, former Nintendo of America VP brand management] leaves and then Don looks at me and goes, 'Produce it.' I went, 'Okay.' So I went back and produced it."
This logo was then changed slightly after E3, with the P and E having their crescent moon-shaped inner flairs changed for hollow semi circles after he was vaguely asked to "just change it a little." That's the logo we still see today in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. If he could change anything about the logo, it would be reverting it to that original version.
He also hopes to be asked to come back to work on the franchise's 30th anniversary. He reckons Nintendo will get another artist to do it, but "I know it won't be right because all the base, all the foundational thought that went into creating it in the first place to survive the way it did and for us to be talking to one another today, there is an energy and a skeleton in there, and to even add another component, like the word 30th or two numerical characters, TLC [tender loving care], big time," he explains.
"Don’t just get it done. It's going to be TLC. So I would hope that Pokemon International would ring me and say, 'Hey, this would be great PR. The guy that did the logo gets to put the 30th on for us. Good PR for us.' That would be smart of them to do. Of course I'm pitching for myself here."
Until then, check out our ranking of the best Pokemon games.
