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Ken Sugimori (born January 27, 1966) is an Art Director and Member of the Board at Game Freak. He is mostly involved as the main art director and illustrator of the Pokémon series.

History[]

Sugimori started his career by helping Satoshi Tajiri providing illustrations for his Game Freak magazine. As Game Freak became a video game developer, Sugimori would assist Tajiri with the development of the games providing much of the graphic design work.

With the development of Pokémon Red and Green, he led the design team that came up with the design of all of the original 151 Pokémon creatures. Since then, he has been involved as the main art supervisor of the series, approving all of the official Pokémon designs produced by Game Freak and external illustrators. He has also produced much of the official artwork and package covers of the series.

As the Pokémon franchise came to Nintendo Switch, Sugimori has been taking on a more supervisory role over the character and Pokémon concept art design for the series. He has also directed some minor projects at Game Freak, such as Drill Dozer.

Pokémon Designs[]

As the main Pokémon artist at Game Freak, Sugimori is in charge of supervising and evaluating all Pokémon designs, as well as providing their official artwork. He has also designed many Pokémon through each generation, mostly in Generation I, where he designed many of the early monster-like Pokémon.

Here is a list of known Pokémon designed by him, mostly based on the internal Pokémon index order[1]:

Game Works[]

Special Thanks[]

Interviews[]

References[]

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