Pokemon Gold Spaceworld Prototype

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I'm surprised that nobody has made a post on this yet, but about a month a go, there was a leak of a prototype of Pokemon Gold and Silver that was featured at the 1997 Spaceworld Convention in Japan. Apparently, an anonymous user uploaded the ROM to a Pokemon hacking Discord server. This game has numerous scrapped Pokemon designs and has never been seen by the public in over 20 years. TCRF has a nice, detailed article about this prototype. https://tcrf.net/Proto:Pok%C3%A9mon_Gold_and_Silver

I'm glad they didn't use as many baby Pokémon as they originally planned to; they just feel like filler. That said however, a lot of the cut babies are super cute.

My favorites of the completely unused ones are the voodoo doll and the panda vampire. Pokémon has always been eager to get dark, but the voodoo doll with a giant needle stabbed through its body is so blatantly creepy that I find it funny. I also like the two wolf-pelt things; I find characters whose real bodies are kept secret via clothing to be really interesting (Mimikyu might've been partially inspired by those pelt-guys). Now that I think about it, though, they also might've been an early concept of Sneasel.

But oh man, I really wish they had kept the original designs of Remoraid and Octillery. It's obvious why they didn't- they couldn't put a gun-shaped thing in a kids game -but the final designs are so much less fun and creative. I also like the scrapped designs of Noctowl and Girafarig more than their replacements; they go all-in on their concepts, whereas the designs they ended up using don't.

Some of the old designs definitely aren't as good as their respective final ones, though. The scrapped versions of Entei, Raikou and Suicune are terrible, especially the emo Suicune. The final look of Porygon2 is also a lot better than the original, since it makes more sense as an iteration of Porygon.

The only scrapped evolution I wish they had kept is the evolution to Farfetch'd. That's something people- such as myself -have been wanting for years, and it's weird that they still haven't made one after coming so close during the development of gen 2.

Overall, it's really interesting to see some of Game Freak's scrapped ideas, and it would be awesome if any of these showed up in a future generation.

Someone needs to hack those back-facing battle sprites into Red and Blue. Most of them match a lot better than the old Red and Green sprites that they neglected to replace.

Seems like a lot of them were designed for Blue, but just didn't make it in for some reason. Maybe at the last minute they decided not to change them to 1:1 resolution for the international releases.