The Mystery of the Lost 18th Pokémon Type

0:00 Within the data structure of the Pokemon games, all Types are assigned an internal index number, which is referenced by the game’s programming. During the early days of Gen 1 and 2, all Types were sorted into two groups based on their damage type. Index Numbers 0 to 20 were reserved for the Types which dealt Physical damage. 21 and above were used for the Types which dealt Special damage. For the Physical Types, only ID’s 0-8 saw active use, but the unused slots were filled with placeholder data just in case. This likely happened because the data structure needed to be set up at a relatively early stage of development. At that time, the developers would not know how many Types they would eventually have in the final game. So they gave themselves a big buffer just in case.

0:46 This is good data management practice. The previous game companies I worked at did this kinda stuff too. This foresight paid off for Generation 2’s development. One of these reserved slots would get used for the physical Steel Type. However, another addition was made. This strange “???” Type would come to occupy ID 19… What’s up with this? Well… everything about this mystery can be traced back to one single move… Curse. Generation 2 saw the creation of many new moves with unusual mechanics, which were intended to add a greater level of strategic and mechanical depth to Pokemon as a JRPG. Stuff like Future Sight dealing delayed damage. Sketch replacing itself with a copied move. Spikes introducing entry hazards. Pain Split dividing out health.

1:32 Perish Song being an instant kill status. Pursuit interrupting the switch out process. Protect completely preventing all damage for the turn. Baton Pass switching out the user and carrying over stat changes. Mean Look and Spider Web’s preventing switches. Sleep Talk and Snore being only usable while under a specific status. And many others. One of these wacky new moves was Curse, which had the strange gimmick of being two different moves in one. If a Ghost Pokemon uses it, they take damage equal to half of their max HP and apply a status on the opponent which deals damage equal to 25% of their max HP every turn. If any other Type Pokemon uses it, it becomes a stat buff which increases the user’s Atk and Def, but reduces Speed.

2:20 The non-Ghost version would go on to have great long term impact, becoming one of the best setup moves for slow physical tanks. In contrast, the Ghost version was almost never used because the self damage cost was too steep. However, there is evidence that the Ghost version was created first as the original design concept. Unlike all other Pokemon games, Gold & Silver showcased an early demo at the Nintendo Space World trade show in 1997. This was a BIG industry event. It was basically the E3 or Nintendo Direct of its era. However, since this was 1997 Japan, very little information about the demo existed. That is, until someone anonymously posted the whole demo online in 2018.

3:05 Digging through the data revealed many early beta concepts for the Johto region and Pokemon, many of which were extensively reworked or cut for the eventual release. Among those cut Pokemon was this curious little creature: a living voodoo doll named Norowara, whose name is a combination of “Noroi” meaning “Curse” and “Wara” meaning “Straw”. Norowara was a Ghost Pokemon with a very strange gimmick - it evolves starting from Level 1. Meaning with every level up, it would attempt to evolve into Kyonpan, a cute jiangshi panda. Like Norowara, Kyonpan’s name was just two words mashed into one. “Kyonshii” is Japanese for “jiangshi”, and pan refers to the… well… panda. Now since YouTube statistics tells me that around 30-40% of my viewers are American, I’m sure at

3:55 least some of you might be thinking “what’s a jiangshi? Explain, Mr funny internet owl man.” Fine, I guess we can afford a short trivia diversion. The name “Jiangshi” directly translates to “stiff corpse”. They are the Chinese folklore version of zombies, but reanimated through magic and sorcery rather than viruses or other scientific reasons. They became a staple of Hong Kong cinema during the 1980s, with jiangshi movies becoming Hong Kong’s counterpart to western zombie or vampire films. Hong Kong cinema also established the portrayal of jiangshi that we have today: corpses dressed in Qing Dynasty government official uniforms with paper talismans on their heads, who move by awkwardly hopping or leaping. Perhaps you’ve seen them before in video games or movies. However, they are much more formidable in traditional folklore compared to

4:41 stereotypical zombies - they’re highly agile, capable of running, jumping and dodging, possess extreme physical strength, and are sometimes capable of supernatural abilities like stealing energy or flying. They are also usually encountered individually rather than as a classic zombie horde, so you can think of them as a magic Chinese-themed zombie superboss. They also obviously did not wear government official attire. Some historians believe that their folklore originated from the ancient days of Imperial China, and was derived from a practice known as “corpse-walking”. Back in those times, transport via horse or carriage was extremely expensive, so the most economical way for poor people to transport corpses to their hometown for burial was to just… carry them home.

5:28 Multiple corpses would get tied up to a pair of bamboo poles via their arms, then the poles would get hoisted onto the shoulders of two laborers. As the laborers walked, the corpses would shuffle, slide, and seemingly hop on the bamboo poles, inspiring the jiangshi’s hopping movements. Because this was an understandably unpleasant sight, corpse-walkers typically travelled during nighttime to avoid crowds, unintentionally making the moving corpses look even scarier in the dark for those unlucky enough to actually see them, sparking the superstitious folklore which transformed into what we have today. That was a fun bit of Chinese history. Now, back to Pokemon. Norowara’s attempts to evolve every level might raise red flags for some of you more game-savvy viewers.

6:14 After all, evolution requires effort to achieve and usually makes a Pokemon stronger, so a Pokemon which attempts to evolve super easily at every possible opportunity must be hiding some sort of secret behind staying unevolved. Your suspicions are indeed correct. If you repeatedly deny Norowara’s evolution until Level 100, it learns an exclusive signature move. If you evolved it, Kyonpan would only get Confuse Ray instead. This is some goofy “flip your 3DS upside down to evolve Inkay” kinda bullshit. In Gen 2. By the way, this is what Inkay’s evolution UI looks like in Pokemon Go. And yes, the game only lets you press the button if you hold your phone upside-down. Anyways. Norowara’s signature move was a Ghost Move named クギをうつ,

7:03 which roughly translates into “hit the nail” or “strike down the nail”. It has the following description: じぶんを こうげきすることで てきにまいターン ダメージを あたえる. Roughly translating to “By attacking themself, deals damage to the enemy every turn.” Sound familiar? That’s right. This was the beta version of Curse. The tested in-game effect functions identically to the Ghost-version of Curse, and both moves even share the exact same move index number of 174. This is why Curse’s animation shows a nail being driven into the user - it's because it was originally a move designed for a cursed straw voodoo doll which was only obtainable by repeatedly pressing the B button multiple times.

7:53 Almost as if the player were slowly forcing a nail into a straw doll. It’s pretty easy to see why this Pokemon didn’t make it to the final release. It’s a bit TOO dark, even for a generation which introduced Dark. However, its signature move DID, albeit renamed to the more generic Curse, and featured two big additions: the non-Ghost alternate mode and the ???-Typing. In the demo, if you altered the data to force Curse onto a non-Ghost Pokemon, it would function identically regardless of the user’s Type. This means, at some point during development, Game Freak decided to make this move check the user’s Type and function as a totally different move if the user wasn’t Ghost. Now, according to conventional development logic, this doesn’t make much sense.

8:41 Rather than going through all the effort to create a unique function to check the user’s Type and produce a different effect, it would have been much easier to just make two separate moves in the first place. Ghost Pokemon could get the unique Curse move while other Pokemon get the generic Normal buff move. You just need to ensure Ghost Pokemon never get the Normal move in their movepools and vice-versa. Same result but far less complicated programming needed. However, the reality is that they DID go out of their way to make the more convoluted option work. Meaning there had to be a reason for it. What could that be? Time for a little speculation and deductive reasoning. The most notable thing about Curse was that its Ghost-version was completely unchanged from its original incarnation.

9:26 What this tells me is that even though Norowara was deemed unsuitable for Pokemon and removed, the developers really liked the actual core mechanics behind how the move functioned and wanted to keep it. In fact, they liked Curse’s mechanics so much so that they practically designed the entire Ecruteak Gym around it - almost every Trainer uses it, and Morty’s entire battle strategy centered around putting you to sleep with Hypnosis, sticking Curse onto you, and recovering his health with Dream Eater. I’m sure some Gen 2 players had expected to receive a TM for Curse or Dream Eater after the battle instead of Shadow Ball due to how prevalent those moves were. Especially since Curse WAS a TM in Gen 2 (it’s in the Celadon Mansion for some reason). Perhaps they felt Curse fit the thematics of the Ghost Type in a really clever way,

10:15 or perhaps they had high hopes for it to be a new way to play using Ghost Pokemon. Or maybe some developer just thought the idea was really cool and got overly attached to it. That happens sometimes. Whatever the reason, they clearly wanted to keep Curse, but they might have felt it was too dark and needed an image change. Something which got lost in translation is that Curse’s original Japanese name is actually a PUN. The kanji for Curse’s current Japanese name is 呪い (noroi), which translates to “supernatural curse” or “evil spell”. However, this same hiragana is also used for the kanji 鈍い (noroi), which translates to “dull-witted”, “stupid”, or “mentally slow”. Sound confusing? Welcome to Learning Japanese Experience. Go find your nearest N5 textbook. In other words, by changing the move’s Japanese name from クギをうつ to 呪い, it went from “sticking

11:07 in a nail” to “curse/slow-witted”, changing the dark implications into a dark humor pun. So they went and created this alternate effect to make the pun mechanically work, letting them keep the original move while making it much more child friendly. This is why the non-Ghost version of Curse reduces Speed, and is often given to dim-witted Pokemon like Slowbro and Snorlax. Unfortunately, this would go on to create an entirely new problem: what Type should this new two-version move be displayed as? It doesn’t feel right to call it a Ghost move, since it has a non-Ghost use. But it doesn’t feel right to call it a Normal move either, because it has a Ghost-exclusive use… So the developers ultimately decided to create a whole new Type solely to categorize Curse under: ???.

11:55 The Type’s interactions being set to total neutrality was possible future proofing - Curse was a self-targeting status move and thus never interacts with other Types, but if the ??? classification was ever used for an attacking move in future for some reason, it would be very confusing for a player to see it deal super effective damage to, be resisted by, or have a Type be immune to it. Was this worth all the extra development effort? Absolutely not. This is what happens when game developers get attached to an extremely unique mechanic, create an exception case to make it work, figure out solutions for the problems that exception case creates, then fix the problems those solutions subsequently create. This is how you go insane as your code spirals into a Lovecraftian Ouroboros of

12:41 patchwork exceptions and unnecessary complexity. That said, it isn’t uncommon for developers to do ridiculous things for the sake of a cool gameplay idea. Like I always say: every good game dev needs to be at least a LITTLE bit insane. Speaking of future proofing, this was one potential use case for the Type’s creation - hypothetical future moves which would change properties depending on the user’s Type. Imagine a move which was guaranteed to Freeze the opponent, but only if an Ice Pokemon used it, while everyone else just inflicted a speed drop instead. However, this hypothetical scenario would never come to pass - Game Freak wisely decided to never create another move like this ever again. Likely because it was way too complicated for its own good. It wasn’t completely wasted though. Generation 3 had a rather clever use for this type - Eggs.

13:31 The Hoenn games saw a complete overhaul of Pokémon’s data structures, UI, and various other game systems. One of these changes was to remove all the old placeholder Type data slots, indicating they had no plans on adding any new Types in the foreseeable future. And indeed, it took 11 years for a new Type to be added. Another change was a rework of the Egg status screen. Back in Gen 2, Eggs had their own status screen separate from Pokemon. But in Gen 3, Eggs instead used a modified variation of the standard Pokemon status screen. Which meant they needed to display a Type, because that slot was present on the standard status screen. They had a few options for this. They could’ve made Eggs match the Types of the Pokemon inside or assigned them all to Normal. But in the end, they decided to assign all Eggs the ???- Type.

14:19 The likely intent was to hide the identity of the Pokemon inside the Egg and make them a surprise. That’s the Doylist answer at least. From a Watsonian perspective, you could argue that all Pokemon in Gen 3 start their existence as ???-Type. But that’s just us being silly. Generation 4 would later realize displaying Type data for Eggs was unneeded, and so removed it from the status page’s UI and re-categorized the game data for all Eggs to be displayed as Normal Type. However, the ??? type remained in the code because Curse still existed. One of the unspoken rules about development work is to never change “live data” unless you have a VERY good reason to, because there is always a risk that changing existing data could break something else in the software.

15:05 Since Curse still worked properly, never caused any game-related problems, and cost nothing to support apart from a single sprite in Gen 3, they just left it in the game. This changed in Generation 4, with the creation of god. No, not that one. (Bidoof) Arceus’s gimmick was to become any Type. Which meant the game needed data for an Arceus of every Type. Do you see the problem…? (???) <- THIS IS A TYPE. If the game’s data was manipulated to force Arceus onto the ??? Type, the game would either glitch out or crash because it’d try to search for an Arceus variant in the game data which didn’t exist. It didn’t matter that players cannot normally make that happen because a ???-plate doesn’t exist. It’s still an obvious loophole in the game logic.

15:51 Bugs are unpredictable, so you always want to avoid leaving loopholes whenever you can. You never know if there’s some sorta bug which would somehow make the game seek out data for ???-Type Arceus. To avoid this potential glitch, there needed to be data for ???-Type Arceus for the game to find, or the Type’s data would need to be removed from the list entirely, removing any need for the game to seek it out. Back during generation 2, the ???-Type had a nonexistent resource cost because Types were only displayed in text strings. In generation 3, Types got these cute colored borders, which were basically just recolors of one sprite, and were cheap to make. Generation 4 was the first time the ???-type had any real significant resource cost,

16:37 because this meant they now needed an Arceus sprite for it. In every generation. Yeah… make an extra set of animated sprites and later a 3D model for the sake of a Type which doesn’t really exist? Ain’t nobody got time for that. Ideally, it would’ve been best to remove it back in Gen 4 when it became an actual liability, but it was probably too late in development by then. Arceus was an Event Mythical and therefore a non-essential part of the main campaign. It’s very likely that either Arceus or Multitype was only designed or implemented at a relatively late stage of the game’s development. At that stage, it’d be WAY too risky to change something as integral as the Type system, because that’s one of the core foundations of the game’s mechanics. It would’ve been much safer to make an Arceus palette swap asset and set up temporary data,

17:25 then deal with it properly during the next generation’s early pre-development phase. Which was what they did. As of Generation 5, the ???-type was finally removed from the game’s system, and the ???-Type Arceus along with it. Curse was recategorized as a Ghost Type, as it was originally intended to be back when it was Norowara’s Nail move. And so life goes on, with nary a single player any the wiser. Thus concludes the legacy of the ???-Type - Quietly coming into existence in the aftermath of a beta Pokemon’s removal, and quietly removed from existence in the aftermath of Arceus’s creation. All without the overwhelming majority of Pokemon fans ever noticing its existence. It isn’t the most impressive legacy… but hey, how many things in Pokemon can fairly say they were personally removed because of God itself?

18:14 Well this was a fun video script to write. It’s always more fun to talk about a game’s development rather than the game itself. If you enjoyed this video, leave it a like and a comment so that the algorithm thinks I actually make good content, and let me know how many times I’d mispronounced the name “Arceus” in the video. Happy Halloween folks.