Their designs, however, are not solidified. By this point, the concepts for the 100 new Pokémon are solidified and match the final batch. A lot of the sprites aren’t fully drawn, so they're clearly in early stages of development. The more interesting part for me comes from the 1999 leaks. Some of these lost designs found here could be reworked in the future to create new Pokémon.Ī lot of the sprites aren't fully drawn, they're clearly in the early stages of development One design has the exact body shape of Cherrim, there's a bagworm family that resembles Burmy and Mothim, and Farfetch’d finally got a more majestic evolution (albeit with a completely different design) in Sword and Shield. Leafeon and most of the design of Canalave City were present in Space World beta, then eventually included in Diamond and Pearl almost 10 years later. With these lost sprites, we can see how long certain ideas were bounced around until they were included. Natu also had a middle stage between itself and Xatu, which is seemingly the only addition to an existing evolution line in this batch of leaks. Some of the more interesting ones are a koala (predating Komala by over 15 years), a ninja flying squirrel (possibly reworked into Emolga at some point) and what looks to be a skeleton dinosaur. The 1997 backup sprites largely overlap with the ones seen in the Japanese Space World demo, with some unseen designs thrown in. As with all leaks, these need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but with Nintendo taking down the site that hosted the leaked sprites, you have to wonder if that’s because they’re legit.
Now, with leaks from the source code of the Korean version of the final games (which contained many backup files) and a Japanese 1999 beta, some gaps between the Space World beta and the final version can be filled in. It was from a demo shown in the Space World expo in 1997, and it was clear that a lot changed from then to their release in 2000. A couple of years ago, a beta copy of Pokémon Gold and Silver was leaked.