Original comments:
“I don't know why Ash suddenly popped into existence in this place. Maybe we could call it a reference to the fact that we have dropped him into this random place for no apparent reason other than to have him in an original location.
Anyhow, the fellow in the sunglasses is Recon Dye, author of "Pokémon X", the first Pokémon sprite comic; thus our action of "ripping him off" way back in 2004. I think we have his permission allowing us to have him appear lying around somewhere...
We'll soon find out what the heck Ash is doing here in future installments!”
I’m not sure why we have our “author avatars” appearing in Donkey Kong, but we had discovered emulation and sprites the year before, and we were still pretty excited about it (still are, really), so just about any game graphics could show up just for the heck of it.
The look of the comic in general was supposed to marry the best of all generations’ graphics up to that point. I still think R/S/E and FR/LG graphics are the most versatile, but I felt that the older games’ sprites had more charm to them. Comic Sans was used because that’s what Pokémon X used.
Generic Town (in the Generic Region, home of the Generic League) was made just so Ash could arrive somewhere. I don’t think we had any plot ideas yet. The map was kinda made up on the fly inside the panels themselves, and most of it doesn’t fit the proper 16x16 pixel grid. It wasn’t until later that we pasted it together to make a proper map. The colors could be better too. We did remake it later, but that never got used since Ash never got around to coming back here.
The joke about Pikachu disappearing while Ash is on his bike is making fun of how he would do the same in Yellow.
