Some of you here may be familiar with Tsurigu, a fakemon I created back in 2006 on the GameFAQs board for the then-upcoming Pokémon Diamond/Pearl.
Before the starters were revealed, there was a rumor that we would be getting starters that were Fighting, Psychic, and Dark, and most famously, a Serebii forums member going by PurpleKecleon created a mock-up promo image featuring a kangaroo, a dinosaur, and a… cat-owl-thing. There had been fakemon prior to this point, obviously, but this is what really kicked off the craze of fakemon-related hoaxes leading up to a game's release.
I could go into how the sprites I created of those three spurred things on… how the real starters being revealed and people faking evolutions of them lead to standards for what was recognized as fake (lookin' at you, Aobasubasu). Even how, based on rumors of Magmar getting an evolution, someone accidentally created Heatmor before Game Freak did.
Instead, however, I'll focus on Tsurigu. I'd been making pixel art for my own games for a few years at that point, but I was relatively new to the art of Pokémon fusion. As you can see in the third image, I was wildly experimenting with different parts and palettes, just for fun. Basically trying to learn about Pokémon design, what does and doesn't work.
Tsurigu was the first sprite I made that looked entirely like its own thing, even if some parts like the Crobat wings are easily identifiable if you're paying attention. I edited it into a promo screenshot of Wooper that had just been released… and yes, if you're wondering, that IS the quality of screenshots we considered to be normal at the time. Anyway, I showed it to some friends on the GameFAQs D/P board, and… well, it spread.
A major contributor was the website for a Spanish or Portuguese-language gaming magazine, which I guess was eager enough for a scoop that they didn't really do any fact-checking. This caused it to spread through the Latin gaming scene, and divorced from context, other sites picked it up from there.
Because of this, it became one of a limited number of creatures featured on Serebii's now-discontinued fakemon page, where it sat for the better part of a decade. At some point Joe decided to limit the main body of the site to canonical information, I'm not entirely sure when, but I imagine that page is where anyone here familiar with Tsurigu will know it from.
I'm really not sure why it took off the way it did. People have told me that it has a certain kind of… maybe not realism, but reality, to it. A lot people who make fakemon (or, at least, who did back then) try to make them as cute, or cool, or… situationally relevant, as possible. Tsurigu is a weird kind of "ugly cute" design, something makes you ask why Game Freak would design something like that… bypassing the question of IF they designed it at all. Something it has in common with two of the very few Gen IV Pokemon shown at the time, Chatot and Carnivine.
In any case, I don't know how relevant Tsurigu is today, or how many modern fakemon artists are even old enough to remember 2006, but I just thought I would share 🥸
by Chesu