The Apocryphal Story of America’s ‘Big Breasted Pikachu’
Three decades after its debut in Japan, the Pokémon franchise is firmly established as a cultural juggernaut. In trading cards, video games, anime, movies, toys and other merchandise, Pokémon is now a billion-dollar business.
But in the early 1990s, Pokémon was an unknown quantity. The creators weren’t sure that the franchise about catching cute, pocket-sized monsters would resonate with audiences outside Japan. Tsunekazu Ishihara, CEO of The Pokémon Company, commented an interview from 2000 that he gave the franchise a one-in-ten chance of appealing to foreign customers.
In that same interview, Ishihara tells a wild story: when he tried to pitch Pokémon to colleagues at Nintendo of America, he was told that the existing creatures were “too cute.” Ishihara was presented with an embarrassing alternative by his Western colleagues: a version of Pikachu that looked like a ‘tiger with huge breasts’.
“We just couldn’t believe what kind of things they were proposing,” Ishihara said.
This anecdote about Pikachu, a kid-friendly mascot reimagined as a “tiger with huge breasts,” has been widely reported, including in Time magazine and popular YouTube channel Did you know that gaming. Pokémon fans have understandably taken issue with the idea of a big-boobed Pikachu, and some have argued that Ishihara’s comments have been misinterpreted.
Fans point to comments from other executives at Nintendo and The Pokémon Company to theorize what the Americans actually suggested in the 1990s: a more monstrous Pikachu with large, muscular pecs.
In the years since that Ishihara interview, former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata told a similar story about the early days of bringing Pokémon outside Japan. In 2008, he said during an investor Q&A that when Pokémon characters were shown to Nintendo employees in the West, those people responded: “You can’t call something so cute a monster. Monsters should be more muscular and terrifying.” Iwata remembered seeing a photo of “a muscular Pikachu,” which he said he would have been embarrassed to show to the people who made Pokémon.
“This cute yellow thing is not a monster, everyone told us,” Iwata later recalled of Pikachu’s reception to reporters in 2014, according to the Wall Street Journal. He said that he and then-Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi were “shown mock-ups of a muscular Pikachu, and advised that only a complete redesign would ensure the Pokémon game would sell.”
Gail Tilden, a former executive at Nintendo of America, told me she was aware that “NOA’s marketing agency was concerned about the ‘too cute, too Japanese’ look” of Pokémon. In the 1990s, that agency proposed “a look with graffiti elements,” she said, which would have given Pokémon an edgier style in keeping with the more aggressive, Play it loud! Nintendo marketing products of that time. She was unaware of any rejected attempts to give Pikachu big breasts.
However, the original exchange between Ishihara and his interviewer contains additional details about what he was shown in the early 1990s – details that are often left out in retellings of this wild yarn. Ishihara compared the “tiger cat with big breasts” he had seen to a character from the musical Catsspecifically from The Japanese Shiki Theater Companywho has been producing this show for over 30 years now. Furthermore, the person who conducted the interview with Ishihara asked for clarification on what he meant by “tiger cat with big breasts.”
“Was it something a woman would cosplay at (Japanese comic convention) Comiket?” the interviewer asked.
“That’s right,” Ishihara said, “and this was something that was actually proposed. For me, it might be fun to enjoy the differences between cultures, but we didn’t think that was something we could do. (…) So we decided that we wouldn’t change anything about the graphics. If we had agreed to change Pikachu, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
As ridiculous as it may seem, it appears that the people who created Pokémon and helped bring it to a global audience may have a two design proposals intended to appeal to American audiences: a terrifying and muscular Pikachu, and a slightly sexualized one. Luckily, neither of them passed The Pokémon Company’s smell test.
Polygon reached out to The Pokémon Company for official clarification on Ishihara’s original comments about a big-chested Pikachu – and to ask if we can finally see the artwork the US marketing teams proposed – but have yet to hear back.
While Pikachu’s design has evolved somewhat over the years and become a bit sleeker, the iconic Pokémon has never officially gone for muscular or fearsome redesigns. And only in the dark corners of the internet does Pikachu have breasts.