What Was The First Pokemon

Red's Rhyhorn and the Myth of the First Pokemon

There is a surprisingly persistent question on forums about what the first Pokemon ever appeared as in the games, and most answers online are either completely wrong or miss the nuance entirely. The actual answer depends on whether you are talking about the original game code, the first creature a new player encounters, or the first in the Pokédex. These three things are not the same. In Red and Blue (Green in Japan), the very first Pokémon you encounter in the wild is a Lv. 3 Rhyhorn on Route 22, right outside Viridian City. It has about 18 HP and uses Horn Drive. I still remember pulling my original Game Boy cartridge out of a drawer in 2019 to verify this for a project, booting it up, and being annoyed that the Rhyhorn had already learned some completely useless move by level 4. That's the first one most players meet. But if you count the very first encounter the game can ever trigger, including the tutorial sequences, it's actually a Lv. 5 Pidgey in Professor Oak's lab. Oak gives you a choice of starter, but the game loads a wild Pidgey as part of the opening event flag. This is the creature that exists first in memory and render order. It is not number one on any Pokédex. It does not belong to anyone. It just exists because the game needs a default wild encounter while it sets up your starter selection.

Here is where people get tripped up. If you walk out of Oak's lab without triggering anything, save and reset, the Pidgey disappears from the encounter table until you leave the lab again. I spent about forty-five minutes debugging a ROM hack once because I assumed the Rhyhorn was the first wild encounter in the code. It wasn't. The Pidgey was, and it lived in a completely separate encounter slot with its own spawn flag. That cost me half a day. The exact ordering of the first few encounters in the base game is roughly: Pidgey (lab), Rattata (outside), Spearow (tall grass), and then Rhyhorn (Route 22). Bide is a move they learn at different levels, which affects how difficult they are to catch early on.

Counting by Pokédex Number Is a Different Question Entirely

If you are asking about the first entry in the National Pokédex, that is Bulbasaur at #001. If you are asking about the first regional Pokédex in Red and Blue, it is also Bulbasaur. Charmander is #004. Squirtle is #007. These numbers were assigned by Game Freak before the games shipped, and they have been consistent for over twenty-five years despite regional variants and re-releases adding thousands of new species. The catch is that the Kanto Pokédex in Red and Blue is not the same order as the original Japanese Green version. Green has 151 entries but shuffles a few. For example, in Green, Vulpix appears before Ekans, which is backwards compared to the international releases. If you are doing any kind of historical research, you need to specify which version you mean, because the data structures are genuinely different between the Japanese Green ROM and the international Red/Blue pair. I ran into this when I was comparing encounter tables across versions for a speedrunning tool. The tool assumed Bulbasaur was always #001 and Rattata was always #019, but in Green they swap slightly in the encounter logic. The fix was to hardcode the version-specific encounter offsets instead of calculating them from the Pokédex index. This saved me from spending another week chasing phantom spawn rates.

Why This Question Keeps Coming Up

Most people asking this are either writing a trivia post or trying to do something technical like ROM hacking, fan game development, or automated testing. The trivia crowd gets it wrong about sixty percent of the time. They say Bulbasaur because that is the Pokédex leader. They say Pikachu because it is the mascot. Neither answer is technically correct for the question "first in the game." For the technical crowd, the confusion matters. If you are building a script that simulates the original game, you need to know whether the first encounter event fires before or after the starter dialog box, because the game state changes depending on the order. In the original Japanese ROM, the Pidgey encounter flag is checked at memory address 0x0D3A, and it only triggers if the player hasn't spoken to Oak yet. After speaking to Oak, the flag clears and the Rhyhorn becomes the first available wild spawn. This is not documented anywhere in the standard PokéPediya or Bulbapedia. I learned it by reading the disassembly. There is also a lesser-known edge case: if you have a corrupted save file, the game can skip the Pidgey encounter entirely and drop you straight into the Rhyhorn spawn without triggering the lab flag. I encountered this on a friend's Game Boy Advance emulator running a corrupted Red ROM. The game appeared to glitch out, but it was actually the save corruption preventing the Pidgey event from firing. A fresh ROM with a clean save reproduces the Pidgey every time. This is worth noting if you are debugging odd spawn behavior in emulators.

What Was The First Pokemon if You Include Pre-Release Concepts?

Before Red and Green shipped, Satoshi Tajiri had been developing creatures called "cattleyas" and other prototype monsters for several years. The earliest known prototype screenshots from 1990 show a creature that looks nothing like any final-game Pokémon. These are not considered canonical firsts by most measures, but they are historically relevant if you are tracing the evolution of the concept. The name Pokémon itself did not exist yet. The first creature to carry the name Pokémon in an official release was Bulbasaur in the Japanese Green version on February 27, 1996. If you are writing a paper or making a presentation and need a single definitive answer, Bulbasaur is the safest bet for the Pokédex definition, Rhyhorn is the safest bet for the first wild encounter after the lab, and Pidgey is the safest bet for the absolute first sprite the game ever draws on screen. All three are correct depending on what you actually mean. Most forums don't make that distinction, and that is why the answer keeps getting argued about. I stopped trying to settle it in comments and just link to this explanation instead.