Greenlit: The history of Sneasel and why Ditto and Poliwag have the same cry

Ivysaur

Ivysaur

Grass dinosaur extraordinaire
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    Hello! It's me, the person who shows up once a year to write something about beta stuff.

    So I have two ideas in mind this time. One came up reading a very informative analysis of Sneasel's development in this fantastic website. This bad boy went through seven redesigns, from the earliest beta to the definitive version in Crystal (not deatured in this pic, but still). My idea was writing a specific explanation of how Sneasel went from the first to the last version, and comment on what it says about the development on Gen II and how the design of pokémon changed over the time. I'd try, of course, to not limit myself to a copypaste from this website- I'm good at that, trust me, it's part of my job description as a journalist.

    [PokeCommunity.com] The history of Sneasel and why Ditto and Poliwag have the same cry


    My second idea came when playing through Isle of Armor this morning and hearing, by turn, the cries of Ditto and Poliwag. It's a well-known trivia fact that they share the same one. But I think it'd be interesting to explain how that ended up happening. I mean, I don't know the exact reason why they chose those two in particular to reuse one, but we do know how cries work and how the many things they had to change over the years caused them to run out of space for new cries to the point that they felt forced to reuse one... while leaving a bunch of them unused! In other words, a fun excuse for a "Red and Green were programmed on a calculator and held together by chewing gum and it's fascinating that they work as well as they do". I can add a small section about why Gen I cries sound so different and distinctive compared to every other gen.
     
    Belated +1 to the idea. Sneasel always appeared to have a weird development given the GS-C difference, and the beta stuff did reveal even more.

    Re: cries - this was a video I remember watching on the topic (and there's at least one other on a related topic by the same channel)

     
    Oh! I saw that video. It has a pretty good explanation about what goes on the technical side of it, but I wanted to go into the 'design' side: how they used most of their unique cries for the earliest pokémon and then found out that they had to recycle them... and how the way they spread them around was ridiculous: there are some unused cries from deleted pokémon and yet two pairs have identical ones!
     
    Ivysaur said:
    Oh! I saw that video. It has a pretty good explanation about what goes on the technical side of it, but I wanted to go into the 'design' side: how they used most of their unique cries for the earliest pokémon and then found out that they had to recycle them... and how the way they spread them around was ridiculous: there are some unused cries from deleted pokémon and yet two pairs have identical ones!
    Click to expand...
    Okay, that makes sense. May be nice to reference/link to the video for readers curious on the technical side I suppose in the article!
     
    Wow, a beta article! Sounds delicious, especially because it's Sneasel and also because a lot of folks would love to get their hands on this side of things.
    Interesting to see how it actually looked a lot like a real life weasel initially only to become what we have now.
     
    Ivysaur said:
    Hello! It's me, the person who shows up once a year to write something about beta stuff.

    So I have two ideas in mind this time. One came up reading a very informative analysis of Sneasel's development in this fantastic website. This bad boy went through seven redesigns, from the earliest beta to the definitive version in Crystal (not deatured in this pic, but still). My idea was writing a specific explanation of how Sneasel went from the first to the last version, and comment on what it says about the development on Gen II and how the design of pokémon changed over the time. I'd try, of course, to not limit myself to a copypaste from this website- I'm good at that, trust me, it's part of my job description as a journalist.

    [PokeCommunity.com] The history of Sneasel and why Ditto and Poliwag have the same cry


    My second idea came when playing through Isle of Armor this morning and hearing, by turn, the cries of Ditto and Poliwag. It's a well-known trivia fact that they share the same one. But I think it'd be interesting to explain how that ended up happening. I mean, I don't know the exact reason why they chose those two in particular to reuse one, but we do know how cries work and how the many things they had to change over the years caused them to run out of space for new cries to the point that they felt forced to reuse one... while leaving a bunch of them unused! In other words, a fun excuse for a "Red and Green were programmed on a calculator and held together by chewing gum and it's fascinating that they work as well as they do". I can add a small section about why Gen I cries sound so different and distinctive compared to every other gen.
    Click to expand...

    Another +1 to this - the Sneasel part will be interesting to see your take on and the cries I am intrigued to see how you manage to spin the words on this, for sure!

    I will go ahead and get this one changed seeming as there's been a lot of Daily attention for it, so if you haven't already started on it please feel free to do so.
     
    I'm going to start with Sneasel for now and I'll do the other one later. I'm waiting for my holidays (starting this weekend), I write enough as is on a normal day :P
     
    I'm very close to finishing the article but I found two new designs for Sneasel today as I was writing it, which is... kind of remarkable. Probably tomorrow!
     
    NipahRika said:
    I think having this as a 'series' is gonna be good.
    Click to expand...

    To be fair I've been doing this as a series since 2019... at the amazing rate of one article per year xD This might be the first one with two!!! Maybe I might even come up with an idea for a third??? Crazy talk.
     
    Turns out, I did have an idea for a further article!

    Last week, I was playing Dynamax Adventures with our dear admin Angie when we got a Lickitung with Thunder and Ice Beam and I said "Ah, those good old Pokémon who were programmed back when they had no idea which moves they should learn, so they gave them everything". Yesterday I was listening to a Gen I podcast and the hosts were commenting how Nidoking is a game breaker because he can learn Surf and Thunder and Fire Blast and basically everything even when it doesn't make any sense.

    So I thought, why not make an explainer about how moves were designed and how the concept of how the gameplay would work evolved over the time, causing these kinds of oddities.
     
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