Why ho oh is not included in the first generation? It already existed in the first episode of the anime. What do you think about it? 
Maybe they had already planned out a bunch of stuff for Gen 2 before the anime came out? Or maybe the anime appearance was just a teaser. The anime started in Japan after base set and jungle had already been released, and the gb games (red and green) had been released more than a year before the anime. By the time that first anime episode released, what was āGen 1ā was already clearly established. So the question isnāt "why wasnāt ho-oh in Gen 1? " but moreso "why did they tease a Gen 2 PokĆ©mon in an anime that originally only had one season planned? " XD
Right observation ā¦ Really interesting would be to find out. We hope someone can help us
The anime was released on April 1 1997. Simultaneously, development of gold and silver was happening. In November 1997, a demo version Gold and Silver was available at Space World 1997. This is the version with the beta/unreleased versions of pokemon that was leaked last year. The demo data included ho-oh. The game ended up being pushed back due to development issues and wasnāt released until 2 years later November 1999.
So basically my interpretation is that ho-oh in episode 1 of the anime was meant to get kids excited for the new game that was about to be released. Development took longer than expected so the timing looks strange in retrospect.
Interestingly enough, there were actually supposed to be 190 pokemon in Red/Green/Blue and the game contains valid and missingNo data for 190 pokemon and garbage data for the rest of the pokedex index numbers. Its very possible ho-oh was planned for gen 1 but was eventually pushed back to appear later in gold and silver
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It was definitely meant as a type of teaser or easter egg to draw more people into the PokƩmon hype / religion / way of life. They were working on fleshing out the second generation of PokƩmon at that point and already had a somewhat finalized design for Ho-Oh. Note how Ho-Oh is portrayed as a shimmering fully golden PokƩmon flying towards a rainbow. This is neither its normal nor shiny color palette but could simply refer to PokƩmon Gold, for which it would end up becoming the mascot. The anime also foreshadowed the Gen 2 games with the mysterious GS ball, which is part of a scrapped story arc involving Celebi within the anime.
To me it is much more likely one of the Gen 2 Pokemon designed in the first gen. The anime was being worked on earlier than itās release in 97, and itās first episode would be the pilot and first thing worked on. At that point it seems the team was still considering Arcanine for a legendary Pokemon slot so lots of things were not set in stone. This was still in the era of hand drawn and hand painted animation cels, so even reusing animation took time. I donāt think they had the knowledge or planning that hooh was supposed to tease a second game
Thanks a lot for your answers
Also it was confirmed the original idea for the Golden āGSā ball was for Celebi to be inside it.
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