>>42205207I remember that info not being anywhere back in 2011.
I'm a bit suspicious about how types came to be, to be quite honest, and not just because the "bird" type. Yeah, they weren't really thinking of specific types when designing the Pokémon, but there are almost as many bipedal spiky dinosaur-looking monsters as there are living, walking plants, so the idea of having elemental monsters was present from the beginning.
Pokémon seems oddly inspired by Itoi's Mother (oddly because they barely share development team, and even Tajiri's review of Mother is rather negative...) either on purpose or coincidentally. Something I find interesting is that PSI in Mother 2 also has elemental properties, with certain enemies being strong or weak against certain elemental types (and some oddities like Fire and Water being the same element) so maybe at some point only moves had specific types? Or maybe there was a separation of types, and certain types were meant only for monsters and others only for moves? The type list seems to be divided, albeit somewhat softly, between "elemental" (fire, water, electricity...) and more "descriptive" (fighting, flying, psychic) types in Gen I
https://github.com/pret/pokered/blob/master/constants/type_constants.asm (after Ghost, the list makes a leap from 0x08 to 0x14)
I'm no z80 asm hacker so I don't really know if there's a technical reason for that separation but if there isn't any then it might be leftovers from an earlier version... Who knows, certainly not me.