Niantic’s Dennis Hwang recently gave a talk at the 2017 Game Developers Conference (GDC), titled “Pokémon GO & Designing Interactive Games for the Real-World.” During his speech, Hwang revealed that the immensely-popular mobile game initially borrowed character models from Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire. “[In] the original IP, the trainers have a much younger look as the target audience tends to skew younger,” Hwang explained.
“But for us, the avatars, we wanted to kind of elevate them to an older generation slightly. We didn’t want some super stylized big-headed, small-bodied characters running on the map when you’re the real game hero. We kind of wanted to match the virtual with the physical.” Hwang shared the above image with attendees to show how an early prototype included an avatar resembling Brendan from the aforementioned games.
Source: Polygon
Pokémon Blog 