Australian Pre-release Pokemon Promotional Poster

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This is a promotional poster that was distributed prior to the release of Pokemon Red and Blue in Australia. This is from my personal collection, I acquired it from a local comic shop in 1998 around the time the games were released.

The existence of this poster has been known for some time, but until now the only image online was a photograph with a date stamp of 15/07/2010 (which I've also incuded).

The poster is of significance because it features early English names for a number of Pokemon, so it gives us an insight into the development of the English localisations of the first generation Pokemon games.

A whopping 73 of the 150 Pokemon on the poster would receive different names by the time the games were made available to US and Australian gamers in September and October of 1998.

The poster is also notable because all of the names are truncated to seven characters. Having played fan translated versions of both Gold/Silver and Ruby/Sapphire before their official releases, I know that the Japanese character limit poses a problem for fan translators. So its my opinion that the list of names was taken from a point in development when the character limit had not yet been increased to accommodate the English names. In the end the player character's name would be increased from five characters in the Japanese release, to seven characters in the English version, and the Pokemon's names from five characters to ten.

It's hard to be certain exactly what some of these early names were, since some of them may be missing up to three characters. As a result of this gaffe some Pokemon wind up with the same name label, notably the Pidgey line where both the second and third evolutionary stages are named Pidgeot. The truncated names sit too high on their nameplates and their respective numbers are off centre below them. The entire thing looks like it was hastily thrown together, there is also what appears to be a hair or a pen mark over Pidge(y)'s nameplate which is actually part of the poster (it's faint but visible on the old photo of the poster too).

How could they have possibly overlooked all this? My bet is they were under serious pressure to get it finished and rushed it through without checking it properly.

I'm really pleased to finally be able to share this with lifelong Pokemon fans and the wider online communities in general. Please share this anywhere you think people might appreciate it!

I've put a lot into this, so please credit me in every instance, and link to this page when appropriate/possible.