FireRed and LeafGreen are not just the standard roms from 2004, they actually got the build system working and compiled a new build (with still unknown changes) more than 20 years later! Very interested in what changes they made.

While final RS has parties that appear to go to the Festa 02 demo Trainers, these do not actually fully match (as seen in the footage from said demo). Here are the actual parties, taken from the July 10th, 2002 files trainerp.dat and tr_pokep.dat:

Found out about the "Make All" documentary too late, tried a last minute save a few hours after the auction ended with others but, oh well. Another item joins the pile of things we know about but don't have. Enjoy the earlier Dialga and Palkia designs, at least.

I feel confident in saying that "earth_up" ("Ground rose up somewhere!") was text meant for moving a Strength boulder off of a pressure plate. This action is impossible to perform in Victory Road due to all of them being placed in corners, but was possible in "DGN02.MAP," an earlier Victory Road.

Revision: 269 has to be Kaen. It was only modified once past its placeholder file and that happened on August 30th 2002, it was quite literally the only cut Pokemon that would have still been in the game by then. Nosepass, its replacement, was modified once in a September 10th batch.

After some time, I now believe that cries 266 and 269 went to Kaen and Evolotto. Torkoal is present with the first cry group; displaced, but in a way similar to later evos. There's some evidence that Spinda was a counterpart to Evolotto, whose random evolution probably used PIDs. It is next to it.

I have been wondering if Mega Darkrai was partially based on The Veil from Destiny 2; a giant eye-like object that sat hidden at the center of a city on lockdown and whose powers were used to allow the sleeping residents to still interact with the world using hologram avatars.

I was honestly completely bowled over by Mega Darkrai. It’s such a big swing and somehow weaves together three design ideas into one misleadingly simple appearance: an evil eye, an eclipse, and a haggard ghost in rags. Darkrai's infamous legs emerge to mimic an eye's optic nerve.

Silver's final sprite with his "BACKUP/SGB_COL.DMG" palette from April 24th, 1999. It is funny how this makes more sense for his jacket than the red highlight, but obviously gives him the wrong hair and Poke Ball colors. He ends up looking a bit too much like James.

Working through my backlog, converted the earlier Trainer parties file "DMONSK.DAT" to pokegold standards (for readability purposes, all values are decimal in the actual file). This was created on April 28th, 1999 and is a snapshot of the game as it was in the early Johto era: pastebin.com/1mHh3a5Q

a while ago we also restored Ken Sugimori's artwork of Ho-Oh from throughout Pokémon GSC's development. insane to see how his style developed in just three years

Serebii Update: Pokémon has released a small animation to commemorate the start of 2026, the year of Pokémon's 30th Anniversary www.serebii.net

It seems to be possible to partially reconstruct the overwritten Abandoned Mine B3F by using a combination of the ladders on the maps surrounding it and a cluster in the (largely sequential) blockset that goes unused. Very partially.

The cut Sweet Honey mechanic would have used a Honey Pot item for storing it, spreadsheets from the 2020 leak mention that it was found in the Goldenrod Dept. Store basement before it was cut, luckily the July 14th structure file was commented and shows its exact location:

Alright! Woo! Another rare treat! For the first time that I know of here are full scans of the Nintendo Space World '97 Official Guidebook: archive.org/details/zine... I'm getting 2400dpi scans of the art done right now but everything else is uploaded #nintendo #zelda #pokemon #mario

The faux Eelektrik attached to Mega Eelektross are made out of its overflowing mucus. They are "collectively called 'false Eelektrik' by scholars—the left one being 'Eeleftrik' and the right 'Eerightrik.'" Some people use its mucus for beauty regimens, with no formally established benefit.

It's probably fine that the biggest clout-seeking leak accounts are just posting DeepL-translated company notes now when I have literally seen it make up sentences that don't exist and duplicate existing ones with different syntax before. It's definitely 256% accurate.

This is less "playing with fire" and more "dancing in an active caldera," this time. Good luck, I guess.

Of course info about Junior RG shows up in the DP documents of all places. There would have been the protag, rival, and the junior. The "overconfident" junior would have become the champion instead of the rival and then you defeat them. I assume this is where the rival's personality came from.

[Art/Edit] Wanted to see what the unfinished Silver Sneasel sprite would look like with similar modifications to the international Gold/Silver sprite (as there was an unfinished version of that in the same scratchpad from around the same time). Top right is a color corrected cbb palette.

As it now looks like reveals are going to be over for a bit, I'm continuing my series of "making a fool of myself by trying to guess the stats and abilities of newly revealed Pokemon / forms" that everyone loves. Megas happen to be my favorite to guess due to there being an obvious pattern to stats.

Wasn't going to say anything but, as it's now getting annoying: Not every Mega in Gen 6 was based on an X or a Y, the ones that were were also seemingly done without much thought as to what game they would actually be in. It was, however, taken into account for most, not all, Z-A Megas.

The characters in Mega Malamar's reveal and teasers are based on NPCs in Legends Z-A. They did a great job recreating the outfits and looks.

More ZM stuff: Just noticed another unused flag in the list after the Zebetite and Escape flags, "AFROHAKKEN". There's an unused graphic in the debug tileset with the writing "Afloraltite Energy," this would likely have been the flag for discovering some (アフロ発見), whatever that would have entailed.

Not my usual field of work but a recent romh... uhh... nothing, had me thinking to check in on the Metroid series again. I wasn't aware that ZM Crocomire actually had a death event flag, and upon finding this out I realized I had a new list to analyze:

Been hearing talk of the Kalos Power Plant again and I still don't believe that the other buildings were ever planned to have interiors. In the earlier prototypes, the only entrance placeholder with a door painted on it is the one that is actually used.

The RS localization glossary files have been fully translated, teaching us such things like Brendan/Yuuki's original name being Sora (presumably changed after a certain March 2002 release) and the ending of Pacifidlog having "gold" backwards: tcrf.net/Development:...

The most evil thing they could do with Mega Dragonite would be to flip it to a Special Attacker to utilize its movepool better, something like 91 / 144 / 105 / 150 / 110 / 100 while keeping Multiscale. Dragonite already has like 37 viable sets in official Singles, what's 3-5 more?

Something I'm a bit disappointed we didn't get any information on are the ribbons that mention towers in Gen 3. I personally believe they were meant for an earlier version of Colosseum, as there's no way their development periods didn't overlap and they're directly after the other Colosseum ribbons.

(LRP) Could be anything, but the proto GB cart in the bottom right of the group photo taken December 94 certainly drew my eyes to it immediately. Also possibly early Bushi Seiryuuden in both of them? It's definitely some sidescroller being worked on in late 94.

The Satoshi Tajiri interview goes into his design philosophy and has some photos from Game Freak's developer offices at the time.

Earlier on, Silver's later parties' default names weren't "???" but were instead Red, Green, and Blue (presumably because he was still named in the intro). What's interesting is that their Starter types match the art with the three of them (Red = Grass, Green JP = Fire, and Blue JP = Water).

Spent a long time trying to find this with a ton of dead leads, glad it's finally been located and preserved in good quality (and not overdubbed with the loudest voice heard on earth): youtu.be/8FdAiQkl8Dg?...

Regular Pokemon fleeing in GSC is a strange enough feature already, but after looking at the table meant for the original Love Ball's effect (Kurt's favorites), I think this table also still accidentally uses SW97 numbers due to age as well:

Sometimes I'll notice something that sticks out to me, then I'll notice other instances of it but not enough concrete evidence. In this case: I think the Machop - Zubat - Ekans - Paras part of the index replaced something, and I think it was a 3-stage Water line and a duplicate Poliwag.

Tired of holding onto this until I finish it so I'll just be posting relevant stuff, it's pretty boring and nerdy though. I was hoping someone else would but it's been a few years. I'll be adding to this thread over time. Files are from the folders DSXY_KIN (June 15, 99) and SXY_KIN (July 14, 99).

@kmk0821.bsky.social noticed that Beldum had a similar eye design to Okutani's Armored Scorpion recently and then we both looked into this further. It appears that all of the named concepts (ie. not "New Character") might have actually been used after all. tcrf.net/Development:...

I'm also sure I'm not the first to make the observation that the closest thing to primordial chaos and mindless destruction in Pokemon can coincidentally be read as "leak" but it is really funny.

Been looking into the Sinnoh creation myths and their development, what's interesting is one version of them that doesn't fully match the final seems to have influenced the HGSS Arceus cutscene. Between May 27th and June 2nd 09, the rings representing the Weather and Lake Trios swapped their timing.

"Why do I get the feeling I've seen the Champions girl before? Is it the shirt? The shoes? Why is there a negative feeling attached-- oh no. OH NO." It's Urshifu and Calyrex's game we just play in it.

Every time there's an official reveal of something in the concept stage there's a dual feeling of "wow, I'm glad we have this" and "oh god there's still so much we don't know" now, especially now.

New concept art of Raikou from Pokémon Gold and Silver, by Muneo Saitō.

After nearly 30 years, we're releasing high quality scans of the original Pokémon Red and Green character art by Ken Sugimori. We now know they're higher quality than GAME FREAK's own internal scans.

Seems the possible Pokemon between Pawmi and Wattrel aren't real after all, oh well. Item IDs 2124 and 2125 are skipped over in a different way than the dummied out materials for the Starters and Paradoxes, implying those item slots were reserved for other reasons.

... Semi-legendary 3 -> Tablets Semi-legendary 4 -> Magatama Charcadet 3rd stage -> Charcadet split evo Hill Magikarp -> Wood ear mushroom 1 (Toedscool) Hill Gyarados -> Wood ear mushroom 2 (Toedscruell) We already knew about Convergent Magikarp, but Future Bouffalant being cut is totally new info!

In December 2021, the following Pokemon's descriptions were changed: AAAAA -> Past Salamence Future Bouffalant -> Future Donphan Future Ice-type -> Future Delibird BBBBB -> Future "Galldevoir" (Iron Valiant) Semi-legendary 1 -> Vessel Semi-legendary 2 -> Sword ...

I was looking through the Crystal files from the leak with the group, this might explain something. It looks like whoever gave the towns their colors in the game might have worked backwards without knowing Lake of Rage was still a town, Mahogany was planned to be red and Cianwood to be green.

Most of these are scenario documents for Crystal content, written by Masuda. Some of them have game mockups and some have real pictures. There are some flowcharts as well for the Suicune storyline/encounters.

Psycho Dog may have been more developed before being replaced by Ralts than thought. Its learnset has odd moves such as Growl and Double Team (Ralts is the only Human-like Pokemon to ever get Growl), Imprison and Future Sight also make sense for a possible reference to the Hounds of Tindalos.

Togepi's early cards (May 99, Feb 00) imply it used poison (the Dex entry appearing as its Silver entry from Aug 01-17 99). With Poison Barb sharing the same Japanese name as Poison Point, one wonders if there's some connection to Togepyon in RS (revisiting an idea at most, it's a hedgehog).