Nineteen ninety-six was a weird time for gaming. We didn't have patches. We didn't have DLC. We just had a grey brick with a green screen and a dream of catching 'em all. Honestly, looking back at the original list of pokemon in pokemon red, it’s kind of a miracle the game worked at all. It was buggy. It was unbalanced. Psychic types were basically gods because of a programming oversight. Yet, that initial roster of 151 monsters defined an entire generation’s childhood.
Everyone remembers the big ones. Charizard. Blastoise. Venusaur. But the real charm of the Red version wasn't just the powerhouses; it was the sheer variety of designs that felt like they belonged in a biology textbook and a kaiju movie at the same time. You had literal piles of sludge like Muk right next to elegant, mythical creatures like Ninetales.
The exclusive list of pokemon in pokemon red you couldn't find in blue
If you were the kid who picked up the Red box at Toys "R" Us, you were signing up for a specific experience. Satoshi Tajiri and the team at Game Freak wanted to force us to talk to each other. That’s why the list of pokemon in pokemon red is missing some key players that were shoved over to the Blue version.
To finish your Pokedex, you had to find someone with a Link Cable. It felt like a shady back-alley deal. "I'll give you my Arcanine for your Ninetales."
Red version had the Ekans and Arbok line. It had Oddish, Gloom, and Vileplume. If you wanted a Scyther—arguably the coolest looking bug in the entire franchise—you had to have Red. Blue players got Pinsir, which, let’s be real, was a consolation prize. Red also featured Electabuzz and the Mankey line. Missing out on Meowth sucked if you wanted to make easy money with Pay Day, but having a Primeape early on was a decent trade-off for dealing with Brock’s rocks.
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From Bulbasaur to Mew: A breakdown of the original 151
The Pokedex starts with the grass-type starter. Most people picked Charmander because, well, fire-breathing dragon. But Bulbasaur was the "easy mode" choice. He shredded the first two gyms.
Then you get into the early-game fodder. Pidgey and Rattata. Everyone had a Pidgeot. It was a rite of passage. But the mid-game is where the list of pokemon in pokemon red gets interesting. You wander into Mt. Moon and get harassed by Zubats every three steps. It was annoying then, and it's annoying now. But then you find a Moon Stone. Suddenly, your Nidorino becomes a Nidoking, and you realize you have a monster that can learn almost every TM in the game. Nidoking was the MVP of speedruns before speedrunning was even a thing.
The nightmare of the Safari Zone
Can we talk about Scyther and Tauros for a second? These were the white whales of the list of pokemon in pokemon red. You didn't fight them. You threw rocks at them. Or bait. Most of the time, they just ran away. It was heartbreaking.
I remember spending hours in the Safari Zone trying to snag a Chansey. The catch rates in the original 1996 code were brutal. If you weren't using the Master Ball on Mewtwo, you were probably tempted to use it on a rogue Kangaskhan that refused to stay in the ball.
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The legendary birds and the psychic dominance
The power scaling in Red was broken. Beautifully broken.
Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres were the peaks of elemental design. Zapdos was the clear winner in competitive play because of its typing, but Articuno’s Blizzard—which had a 90% accuracy in Gen 1—was terrifying.
Then there was Alakazam. If you had a friend to trade with, Alakazam was a cheat code. In the original games, Psychic types only had one weakness: Bug. And there were no good Bug moves. Twinneedle? Please. If you went up against Sabrina without a high-level Snorlax or your own Psychic type, you were toast.
Technical glitches and the "152nd" Pokemon
You can't talk about the list of pokemon in pokemon red without mentioning MissingNo. It wasn't an official Pokemon, but every kid on the playground knew how to find it. Surfing along the coast of Cinnabar Island after talking to the old man in Viridian City triggered a memory leak that birthed a pixelated mess. It could duplicate your items. It could also delete your save file. High stakes gaming.
And Mew. The mythical #151.
For years, rumors swirled. "Check under the truck near the SS Anne!" "Beat the Elite Four 100 times!"
None of it worked. Mew was an event-only distribution, a secret tucked into the code by Shigeki Morimoto at the very last minute. It wasn't even supposed to be there. That secrecy added a layer of mystery that modern games, with their data-mining and day-one leaks, just can't replicate.
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Why the original 151 still matter in 2026
We’ve seen over a thousand Pokemon now. Some are literal keychains or bags of trash. But the original list of pokemon in pokemon red feels foundational. They were based on simple concepts. A turtle with cannons. A magnet with an eye. A mime that is deeply unsettling.
These designs had to work with very few pixels. They had to be recognizable in black and white. That constraint bred creativity. Even now, when a new game comes out, the first question people ask is, "Which of the originals are in it?"
If you’re looking to revisit the Kanto region, here is how you should actually approach that classic roster today:
- Don't ignore the "boring" ones. A Raticate with Hyper Fang can carry you surprisingly far in the early game.
- Exploit the badge boost glitch. In the original Red, certain stat-boosting moves like Swords Dance actually reapplied the stat bonuses you got from Gym Badges every time you used them. It made you a god.
- Focus on Speed. In Gen 1, your critical hit ratio was tied to your base Speed stat. This is why Persian, with its high speed and Slash (which had a high crit rate), was secretly one of the most dangerous Pokemon in the game.
- Wrap is broken. If you use a fast Pokemon with Wrap (like Dragonair), the opponent literally cannot move until the effect ends. It’s cheap. It’s frustrating. It works.
The original Pokemon Red wasn't a perfect game. It was a chaotic mess of ambitious ideas held together by luck and clever programming. But that list of 151 monsters changed the world. It turned the Game Boy from a dying handheld into a cultural phenomenon. Whether you're hunting for a Dratini in the Safari Zone or trying to figure out how to evolve your Graveler without any friends nearby, the journey through Kanto remains the definitive monster-collecting experience.
To get the most out of a retro playthrough now, try a "Nuzlocke" challenge. It forces you to use the weird outliers on the list of pokemon in pokemon red—the Tangelas and the Farfetch'ds—that you usually just ignore. You’ll find that every single one of those 151 sprites has a personality that modern 3D models sometimes struggle to capture.
The best way to experience this list isn't just reading about it; it's dusting off an old cartridge or firing up a Virtual Console re-release and realizing that, yeah, Jolteon is still way cooler than Flareon.