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Fakemon, also calledFakémon, are unofficial, fanmade fictional creatures based on thePokémon franchise ofmonster-taming games.
While many such designs have been created purely asfan art, others are made specifically as hoaxes to fool fans into believing they will appear in future series titles, or as unique creatures added togame mods.
The word Fakemon is aportmanteau of the wordsfake andPokémon.[1] In Japanese, they are known asOripoké (オリポケ; from "original Pokémon").[2]
According toGameRant, Fakemon have existed "for almost as long as Pokémon itself", but began to proliferate with the advent offan-made video games[3] as well as the advent of the internet.
Founded in 1998, "Mewthree and Frogglet's Pokémon Factory" (later called Pokémon Factory) became the first website to formalize the creation of Fakemon.[4] A public forum, it required members to post their creation to other members, who would provide critique until its revisions deemed it "presentable for review by Pokémon Factory staff." The intent of the website was to create "an outlet for fan innovations in pokémon [sic] ."[5]
The popularity of the creatures has led to the creation of various online Fakemon image generators. For example, in 2022,Lambda Labs researcher Justin Pinkney created Text-to-Pokémon, which utilizesStable Diffusion to create creatures based on a user's written prompt.[6][7][8] The model was trained on "BLIP captioned Pokémon images with twoNVIDIA RTX A6000GPUs on the Lambda GPU Cloud for around 15,000 steps."[8]
As of 2024, Fakemon are popular on websites such asDeviantArt,Instagram,TikTok, andReddit,[9][10] as well asYouTube.[10] Some Fakemon designers are professional artists in the video game industry.[11] Fakemon design has been described as "a way for fans to express their individuality while honoring the franchise they love."[12]
Fakemon are designed by fans of thePokémon franchise using design principles from thePokémon video games andanime, such as color, level of detail, anatomy, and relatability.[13][14][11] Fakemon designers have employed the use ofMicrosoft Paint andPhotoshop to mimic the pixel art of thePokémon video games.[9] Fans design Fakemon based on real-world concepts such as culture, architecture, animals, plants,[10] and mythology.[15]
Fakemon are often created to accompany fan-madePokémon regions or games.[1][16] For example, the fan gamePokémon Uranium has over 150 Fakemon featured in it.[17]
Fakemon designs have occasionally been so similar to the visual language ofPokémon that they have been confused for realleaks.[14][18] For example, a set of three fake fire, water, and grass starter Pokémon were created by Leopoldo Spagna as a hoax in 2018, prior to the announcement ofPokémon Sword and Shield. Spagna's designs were featured on multiple websites as a legitimate rumor, leading fans to create fan art andmemes of the supposed Pokémon.[18] While he later apologized for the hoax, PokéNinja, aTwitch streamer, backed a special tier of theKickstarter forTemtem, a game resemblingPokémon, putting forth one of the fake Pokémon, Platypet, as a monster design. Platypet was first included within the game when it releasedearly access throughSteam on January 21, 2020.[18][19] In the game's universe, Platypet stars in a cartoon about toxic-elemental Temtem creatures.[18]
The2024 Game Freak data breach revealed that a ninth, Flying-type evolution ofEevee had been planned for the 2016 gamesPokémon Sun andMoon, but scrapped due to similarities to a design made by a fan.[20]
