A Magnemite eye on a hulking Pinsir body, with a new name like Korosu: who draws every single ridiculous Pokémon fusion? Is an image-generating AI secretly painting a new monster for every click?
At least for the original Pokémon Fusion website, the answer is much simpler. It reused pieces of existing sprite images and assembled them with code.
Creator Alex Onsager described the process in an interview originally published in 2013. There were two main jobs: resize one Pokémon's head and place it in the appropriate spot on another Pokémon's body, then change the body's colors to match the head. The repetitive assembly could be automated once the source images and positioning information were prepared.
Think of it as a collection of reusable parts. A human prepares the head and body images and the information about where they fit. The program keeps carrying out the same instruction: take this head, put it on that body, adjust the colors. Suddenly a steel eyeball has moved into a beetle-shaped apartment. Neither original Pokémon signed the lease.
Names can be assembled in a similarly mechanical way. The Japanese name of Magnemite, コイル, contributes コ; Pinsir's Japanese name, カイロス, contributes ロス. Together they spell コロス (Korosu), which sounds like the Japanese verb “to kill.” The rule does not stop to ask whether the result is a good idea. That is part of the fun.
There are different ways a service could deliver the images: it might store many finished combinations ahead of time or assemble the chosen pieces when you click. Neither approach necessarily needs an expensive AI image request for every visitor. We have not verified which method the current PokeNavi generator actually uses. Onsager's explanation describes the earlier, separate project.
The clever part isn't creating one perfect monster. It is building a simple system that can create an alarming number of wonderfully imperfect ones.
Sources: Interview with original creator Alex Onsager · PokeNavi fusion generator
