Pokeyugami's Pokémon Fan Art

About

Pokeyugami's Pokémon Fan Art refers to the viral artwork of Pokémon fan artist @pokeyugami in the style of original Pokémon designer and illustrator Ken Sugimori. @pokeyugami began growing popular after showing short videos imagining what the style might look like in a Pokémon video game, leading to fans clamoring for such a project. In September of 2023, the studio @Yanako_RPGs announced they would start developing a game based on @pokeyugami's artwork.

Origin

On April 18th, 2022, Pokémon fan artist @pokeyugami^[1] posted their first piece of fan art based on Ken Sugimori's original designs for the series. The illustration shows the first game's protagonist playing the Pokémon card game with Giovanni, and gained over 5,900 retweets and 22,000 likes in roughly eighteen months (shown below).

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One month later, on May 20th, @pokeyugami posted a short clip demonstrating how the art style could look in a hypothetical modern Pokémon video game. The tweet went viral, gaining over 51,000 retweets and 217,000 likes in just over a year (shown below).

Spread

The video tweet by pokeyugami drew significant media attention. IGN^[2] wrote about the video on May 21st, 2022 and Goombastomp^[3] wrote about the video the following day. The video drew significant attention outside of Twitter as well, as reposts gained over 3,800 points in /r/pokemonlegendsarceus,^[4] 450 points in /r/Nintendo^[5] and 170 points in /r/ImaginaryKanto.^[6]

Over the following weeks and months, pokeyugami posted more videos with the concept. They posted a second clip from the hypothetical game, gaining over 20,000 retweets and 96,000 likes in just over a year (shown below, top). On June 3rd, they posted a video showing what Pokémon from Scarlet and Violet could look like, gaining over 12,000 retweets and 60,000 likes in the same time frame (shown below, bottom).

Yanako RPGs' Game

On September 1st, 2023, the Twitter account for Yanako RPGs, a developer who created the retro, Pokémon-inspired RPG Dokimon,^[7] announced on Twitter^[8] that they would begin making a game inspired by pokeyugami's artwork, gaining over 250 retweets and 2,100 likes in four days (shown below). In the ensuing thread, Yanako clarified that they would attempt to implement elements of newer Pokémon titles but ensured it would be an "original" game. Kotaku^[9] covered their announcement, but expressed worry that Nintendo may try to shut it down.

Search Interest

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External References