Some facts about videogame canon you wish you could scrub not just from the internet, but your very own mind. Unfortunately, I am burdened with the unenviable task of informing you of things that are true, and it is apparently very much true that a bunch of well-paid Americans, sitting around a room, had the fleeting thought: What if we gave Pikachu a heaving bosom.
It’s an old anecdote, over two decades young at this point, but one that Game*Spark recently did the legwork to verify (thanks, Automaton, for the translation).
Game*Spark responded to the story’s resurfacing online—particularly, the fact some misgivings were had over the direct translation of “mune”, which can either mean pectoral muscles or breasts. Here’s the original quote, shared by way of an old interview with The Pokémon Company CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara, which has archives going back to the year 2000:
“When I first showed Pokémon to them, they told me it was too cute. The staff at Nintendo of America then suggested their own designs for the characters—I won’t show those illustrations to anyone as long as I live, but they kind of looked like the characters from the Cats musical.”
Ishihara then goes on to explain that “Pikachu was changed into a character shaped like a kind of a tabby cat with huge breasts.” Or, as mentioned above, “mune”.
Game*Spark, however, original quote in hand, noted that the interviewer went on to ask “like those girls who do Pikachu cosplays at anime conventions?”, to which Ishihara replied: “Yes, exactly, they presented that kind of design to us for real. I thought it was interesting, in a sense of appreciating such cultural differences. However, I didn’t want to compete in the [overseas] market with that kind of thing.”
In other words, given Ishihara’s “exactly”, the word “mune” in this context was absolutely, 100%, factually referring to a sketch of Pikachu being turned into a neko anime girl with huge bazongas. There’s no way around it, even if I could’ve found a better way to phrase that.
In a twist, though, Automaton notes that the opposite was also true. Citing a 2008 financial results briefing where the late president of Nintendo Satoru Iwata claimed that the poor, beleaguered staff at the company were also shown “a muscular Pikachu”.
While Ishihara seems keen to take those designs to the grave, I can’t help but feel a touch bummed out because I want to see those pictures. I want to see them so bad—in a l’appel du vide, Lovecraftian, stare-into-the-abyss sort of way. Like a Junji Ito character crawling towards a hole in the side of a cliff, knowing I’ll be forever transformed on the other side of that experience. After all, with the way Nintendo’s been acting in recent years, my innocence is already broken.
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