The Pokemon Company Sees Plenty Of Room For Many More Pokemon Designs

With the release of Pokemon Scarlet And Violet last year, the franchise as a whole introduced its 1,000th unique Pokemon design--and then some. However, even with so many Pokemon already in the game, The Pokemon Company COO Takato Utsunomiya says new additions aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

GameSpot sat down with Utsunomiya as part of a group interview at the 2023 Pokemon World Championships in Yokohama, Japan, where he responded to a question regarding challenges in coming up with new designs for Pokémon. Essentially, according to Utsunomiya, with new generations of developers will come fresh Pokémon ideas.

"As new generations of people come to work on the games and they'll have new ideas for new creatures, we're able to continue creating new Pokemon," Utsunomiya said.

He was then asked if the games will ever have too many Pokémon, to which he said there are still plenty of options for inspiration in the real world, so the possibilities are limitless.

"Right now we're over 1,000," he continued, "but if you think about how many living creatures there are in our world, there's something over hundreds of thousands. I would think we probably still have a long way we can keep going."

Finally, Utsunomiya said the responsibility for creating new Pokémon designs ultimately falls on the development team at Game Freak, as they "need to have that kind of development capability to always be producing new creatures and coming up with new ideas." If they ever lose that ability, Utsunomiya says, "then it would be difficult to continue Pokemon through all of these generations."

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are available exclusively on Nintendo Switch. The first half of the Secret Treasures Of Area Zero downloadable content, The Teal Mask, is set to launch September 13.