If this week somehow hasn’t been filled with enough Pokémon for you then this latest release by The Cutting Room Floor is sure to remedy that. The site received a dumped ROM of the game’s Space World 1997 demo and has divulged all of its very intriguing secrets. Resetera user ERASaur, who worked on analyzing the demo’s contents, provided a full breakdown. Let’s dive in…

First up is the bit most of you will want to see – the Pokémon. Various early concepts are seen here, alongside brand new designs and some that have been alluded to before. Keep a close eye out for the likes of baby Meowth and Ponyta, as well as some early prototypes for Pokémon that appeared much later, like Lickilicky and Leafeon.

There are also a few trainer sprites, most of which either return from the previous games or made it into the final product. Still, some are rather huge changes, like the third and fourth sprites being early designs for Bugsy and Morty.

After that we learn that Game Freak was incredibly ambitious with the world map originally, planning on making it covering all of Japan visually.

Rather than include all of Kanto, the original plan seemed to be to condense Kanto to a ridiculous degree, as seen in the bottom right of the full map…

Finally, the start of the game would be quite different, with the player having a brother called Ken and generally mimicking Red/Blue’s opening, complete with Green (Blue in the west) taking you to the lab, like his grandfather did in the original.

It’s exciting to see that even just a few short years after the franchise started Game Freak was planning on severely shaking up Pokémon’s formula. Here’s hoping more development secrets come to light in the years to come.

