Written by Dr Lava, December 20 2019

Yesterday the community received the third major leak of Pokemon beta content. First, Gold & Silver’s 1997 demo leaked in May 2018, then in February 2019 prototype assets from Red & Green leaked and were published by Helix Chamber. Now we’ve got one more leak to add to the list — hundreds of Gen 4 beta sprites.

In this article, I’ll discuss when and where the leak dropped, what the leak contained, whether it’s legitimate or not, and — assuming it is legitimate — the likely reason Game Freak changed these beta designs in Diamond & Pearl’s final build. But first thing’s first — how it happened.

When and Where

The leak first appeared on /vp/. In case you’re not familiar, /vp/ is a Pokemon-focused forum on 4chan where anonymous users — who are referred to as anons — like to chat about Pokemon prototypes. Admittedly, 4chan has a bad reputation for its use of foul language, doxxing, and what some might describe as bullying. But despite all that, /vp/ serves some important purposes in the Pokemon Prototype community. In this case, it was the site’s ability to disseminate leaked material quickly and anonymously.

On Thursday, 19 December 2019, an anonymous user made a post: “hey /vp/ check out these silly sprites haha.” A link was attached, leading to a website with nothing on it — except for just one page. The page contained hundreds of Pokemon sprites that looked like they were created between Gen 3 and Gen 4, along with all the corresponding Gen 4 release version sprites for comparison. Anons quickly realized the implication — these were Gen 4 beta sprites.

Following the leak, I posted a few dozen sprites to my Twitter

Anons were skeptical, but interested. Over the next few hours, the leak spread like wildfire to pretty much everyone in the Pokemon Prototype community. Everyone was looking through old Diamond & Pearl pre-release screenshots, as well as unused sprites found in Gen 4’s internal data. The leaked sprites appeared to jive with all known material.

If the leak is bogus, and someone made these sprites as a hoax, it must have taken them hundreds of hours, and they must have gone to great effort to make sure their fake sprites matched all the Gen 4 beta sprites currently known. It would have required a huge amount of effort… and all they attempted to fool us with was some gender differences, some of which are barely even noticeable. Why go to all that trouble? I’ll come back to the leak’s legitimacy later — first, let’s talk about what the leak contained.

Leak Highlights

Of the hundreds of beta sprites contained in the leak, none have significantly different designs compared to release version sprites. Many of the poses are different, but these are essentially the same Pokemon that appeared in Gen 4’s final build. In other words, the leak wasn’t on the same scale as Spaceworld ’97, which revealed dozens of lost Pokemon that had never been seen before. But there is one thing that makes this new leak significant — lots and lots of scrapped gender differences.

Assuming these sprites are legit, it appears Game Freak was originally planning to give almost every Pokemon unique attributes based on their gender. Many of the differences are subtle — for example, female Bulbasaur have larger spots than their male counterparts, and female variations of the Cyndaquil family all have darker snouts.

In fact, most starter Pokemon exhibit small differences — a detail that might have been controversial had those changes made their way into Diamond & Pearl’s final build. Some fans might have gotten annoyed if the Professor didn’t gift them their preferred gender with the design details they liked better.

But while many of these beta sprites’ gender differences are subtle, there are also plenty whose unique traits are much more noticeable. Particularly those exhibited by some of the bug Pokemon. A few of these differences made their way into Gen 4’s release versions, like Scyther’s enlarged abdomen. But most ended up getting cut — like those of Ariados, Yanma, and Beedrill. Beautifly’s wing variants were included in Gen 4’s final build, but got scaled back significantly, to the point where the difference between males and females was almost imperceptible.

Charizard is particularly interesting — males are shown with the usual two horns, but females only have one. This is especially interesting because some early official artwork depicted Charizard with just one horn, like on a 1996 Jumbo Carddass card (pictured below). Giving female Charizard a single horn may have been Game Freak’s attempt to retcon some of that off-model artwork.

One of 4chan’s anons pointed out that the July 2006 issue of Corocoro included pre-release information about Diamond & Pearl. Back when the magazine was released, Bulbapedia translated a few excerpts, which read in part: “Male and female Pokémon will now be visibly distinguishable in most, if not all, cases. Most female Pokémon will be smaller or will have reduced or lacking physical features.” This statement of course jives with what we’re seeing in these leaked Gen 4 beta sprites.

Screenshot from my Gen 4 cut content video. Masuda can be seen in Corocoro teasing 16 player functionality. The feature never made it into the final build.

By the way, in case you haven’t heard of Corocoro — it’s a Japanese magazine that used to serve as a source for lots of pre-release information about Pokemon games. In fact, when Pokemon Blue first released in Japan, it was made available exclusively to subscribers of Corocoro magazine. That should give you some idea of the close relationship between Game Freak and Corocoro.

The release versions of Diamond & Pearl updated Pokemon from Gens 1-3 with lots of new gender differences. In total, gender differences were doled out to 63 out of 386 Pokemon. You might be wondering why I’m only addressing Pokemon from Gens 1-3. After all, this was a leak of Gen 4 beta sprites, right? Well, the leak actually doesn’t contain all that many Gen 4 Pokemon. So at the stage of development these beta sprites were created, it seems Game Freak was primarily focused on implementing gender differences in older Pokemon, and hadn’t yet created all the new Gen 4 Pokemon.

Why Were They Scrapped?

It appears Game Freak originally planned to give most, or maybe every Pokemon unique male and female designs. And that brings us to why so many of these gender differences might’ve been scrapped — Gen 4 sprites were animated. Granted, they weren’t fully animated like in Gen 5. But giving every Pokemon gender differences would have essentially doubled the number of Pokemon designs, and thus doubled the number of animations. And it would have doubled the animations for all sprites and 3D models in future games as well. It wouldn’t require twice as much work… but it would eat up a lot of time and money, and it probably wouldn’t have done much to increase sales.

On top of that, implementing all these gender differences into the anime probably would’ve been a nightmare. And since it was mostly the female designs getting changed, in retrospect it might look like every Pokemon from older games and anime episodes were male. So it’s really not surprising gender differences ended up getting scaled back in Gen 4’s final build. They probably decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

Female Mudkip’s backsprite can still be found in Gen 4’s internal data

Is It Legit?

Okay, now let’s talk about legitimacy. Is this new leak for real? Well, as I mentioned earlier, it would take an incredible amount of work for someone to create all these sprites — hundreds of hours, maybe more. And as I also mentioned, they’d have to really do their homework to make sure their fake sprites lined up with pre-release materials, the games’ internal data, and other development info like that 2006 issue of Corocoro magazine. It seems unlikely.

Plus, if you were going to put this much work into a hoax, wouldn’t you include at least one lost Pokemon? Of all the major beta leaks, this is the only one that doesn’t reveal a single lost Pokemon. If I was a hoaxster, you better believe I’d have drawn at least one lost Pokemon sprite.

Less than 24 hours after the leak was shared on /vp/, the owner of the mysterious website hosting the beta sprites was doxxed by one of 4chan’s anons. Shortly after that, the website owner removed all the beta sprites and replaced them with the following message:

———-

There are a number of reasons why I took this page down, and I’d like to address a few things.

First off, people are making the connection between this site to Helix Chamber, and I can definitely see where they’re coming from. Someone from Helix Chamber asked if I could host something on my site a while back since I’m in the dev/proto scene and I own the [URL redacted by Dr Lava] domain, so I agreed. I deal with this kind of thing on occasion, so it wasn’t an odd request.

This site has no affiliation with Helix Chamber, and apparently they’re catching some flack over this, so I wanted to make it known that this was a page I made to pass around to a few people, and that Helix Chamber didn’t have any involvement with this other than reporting on it after release.

Additionally, the sprites were given to me anonymously through Tox some time ago, and while it initially appeared to be a gen 4 sprite dump from the sprites I looked through, I wasn’t entirely sure of their validity, so I saved them and moved on. I’d forgotten I held onto them until I was going through a few old files and stumbled across them. I looked through them all again and noticed one of the Pikachu sprites was lop-eared, and the Weavile and Munchlax sprites matched up with an older design shown in some early screenshots. I decided to make that comparison table I had up here for a few months so I could more easily compare them.

Someone I initially gave it to posted the link on /vp/ recently, and a few users have been going out of their way to find the source. I read over the thread, and while most people expressed interest in or enjoyed the sprite table, I’ll be taking it down to prevent any further harassment and to stop those who are trying to uncover the source, which will result in the exact opposite of what those people want.

Lastly, I wanted to say that I’m open to answer any questions about the sprites or anything else on the site. If you have any questions or if you want to securely and anonymously donate anything (assets, code, prototypes, etc.), my Tox ID is as follows: [ID redacted by Dr Lava].”

———-

So as it turns out, the person that uploaded the sprites to this website wasn’t the same person that posted the link on /vp/. I’ve since spoken with someone who wanted our conversation to remain off-the-record. There’s some things I can’t share, but I will say this — I’m leaning quite heavily towards thinking this leak is legit.

It’s worth noting that after the Red & Green asset leak back in February 2019, /vp/ basically ripped Helix Chamber a new butthole for their mishandling of the leak’s publication. If you’re not familiar with that controversy, I covered it in this article back when it happened. The anons on /vp/ also went to great effort to uncover the identity of the Red & Green leaker, which could have subjected him to potential legal action. So it’s not surprising this Gen 4 leak was pulled down so quickly.

Fortunately, pretty much everyone in the Pokemon Prototype community saw this coming a mile away and had already backed up all the leaked beta sprites. I actually downloaded them myself as soon as I saw the leak… but unfortunately, I later realized I’d only downloaded half of them! Facepalm Fortunately, I was able to acquire the full collection from one of the anons on /vp/. So kudos to that guy.

If you’re late to the party, don’t panic — folks have been passing around archived versions, Google Drives, and MEGA Drives containing the leaked sprites all over the internet. I’m not gonna host a download link to the full collection here, because honestly, at this time I’m unsure of the legality. But by the time you’re reading this, the sprites probably aren’t hard to find with about two minutes of Google searching.

Related article: Ken Sugimori Reveals Origins of Gen 5 Pokemon Designs

Closing Comments

I’ve spoken with the website owner via Tox. He told me he uploaded these sprites onto his website and only gave the URL to a few friends, seeking their input and analysis regarding the sprites’ legitimacy. He doesn’t know who leaked the URL on 4chan. I’ll publish more information and images in a follow-up article later this week.

[December 27, 2019 Update: The website owner has issued a public statement identifying themselves and explaining the sprites were the result of a hack of Nintendo servers. All claims corroborated by outside sources. Full story covered in this follow-up article.]

My tweet about the Festa 2002 demo

Oh and by the way, in case you’re wondering what could possibly leak next… there’s still the 2002 Ruby & Sapphire demo. After beta sprites leaks from generations 1, 2, and 4, Gen 3 seems the most likely to come next… but who knows. If you like watching videos about Pokemon beta and cut content, you might wanna check out my YouTube channel. And if you want to contact me about this leak, or for any other reason, the easiest way to reach me is on Twitter, where I’m @DrLavaYT.

Related Videos:

• Gen 5’s Scrapped Special Event: The Lock Capsule

• Gen 4’s Internal Data & Cut Content

Related Articles:

• Ken Sugimori Reveals Origins of Gen 5 Pokemon Designs

• Gorochu: Developer Translations and the 2019 Leak