Nintendo Considered Making Pikachu Buff For American Audiences

Many see Nintendo as a company that's too glued to the idea of making family-friendly stuff, but it turns out they're actually up for experimenting – at least when it comes to appeasing Western audiences. We've previously talked about how even the team behind the ultra-popular character designs of Nier Automata once caved to the totally baseless fear that American audiences wouldn't fall for anime characters and thus came up with a main character that seemed out of the WWE, but we had no idea that the very same thoughts once echoed the minds of the creators of Pikachu. Below we can see the late and great Satoru Iwata explaining with a straight face that they originally considered a much more swole version of Pikachu, and therefore asked artists to come up with various muscle-bound and probably Tumblr-worthy versions of the beloved Pokérat.

We're yet to retrieve the probably cursed scrapped designs of the Swole American Pikachu Nintendo wanted to go with, which means we have to look for “fan approximations”, like the glorious ones painted by Twitter user Brushforhire:

That looks great, but we're also thinking they must've also used that as an excuse to ask for something even sexier, so here it is:

That's especially interesting as just this week we found out that Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario and Zelda has revealed that the straight-up cringed when he saw the kid Link's look in Wind Waker, and that ended up becoming one of the most iconic ones in the franchise (no, we don't have images of a would-be swole version of kid Link).

Top Image: amazon/Mangyi GK