A Prototype of Pokemon Gold and Silver Has Now Surfaced Online!

Throughout the years, we’ve seen quite a few interesting early prototypes and demos of games surface online. There was that Rayman demo, which showed the game as it was on the SNES. There were the kiosk demos for Mario Kart DS, complete with all manner of interesting tracks not found in the final version. And in general, there have been tons of completely unreleased games posted online too, like Mr Tuff, Jelly Boy 2 and Nightmare Busters.

But today, something was found that puts all of them to shame. A game whose mere discovery was history in the making.

Yep as the title suggests, a prototype ROM for Pokemon Gold and Silver was posted online, complete with tons of content from the game’s early development. It’s got Pokemon not found in the final game. It’s got locations and items not found in the final game. In other words, it’s the holy grail for video game collectors and beta enthusiasts.

So, here’s the page about it on the Cutting Room Floor Wiki.

As well as our thoughts on many of the interestings things found in it. Starting with the bit everyone wants to know. The Pokemon that never made the final cut…

Unused Pokemon

Cause at this point in development, Pokemon Gold and Silver had a very different cast list lined up. Like this line of fire type starters, presumably the early equivalents of the Cyndaquil family:

As you can see, they’re nothing like the final versions. Hell, they don’t even look like they’re based on the same species, with their designs being more inspired by mice (and perhaps Eevee) than whatever the hell Cyndaquil’s family are meant to be based on.

And the craziness is far from over there. Nope, other interesting early Pokemon designs include this Tangela style monstrosity (perhaps an early evolution meant for it?), a very strange two headed ghost creature and something best described as dog made of balloons. They’re all fascinating designs, and real glimpses of what we nearly got in the final games.

Existing Pokemon also had a few design tweaks too. For instance, look at Scizor here. Notice anything different?

Yep, he seems to have a more ‘organic’ design at this point in development, with his claws seeming more like Hydreigon’s extra heads than anything else. It’s an interesting change and makes us wonder whether the whole ‘steel typing’ aspect may have been a late consideration in of itself.

What’s more, he’s not exactly alone on the design change front. Oh no, Heracross went through a fair few changes itself:

As did Kingdra, Hitmontop and Feraligator. Oh boy, that last one looks even less like the final version than Typhlosion did:

What even is that? Some sort of seal/dinosaur hybrid? Whatever it is, it’s as far a cry from the crocodilian we got in the actual game as you can ever imagine.

Also, intriguing are the designs that seem to be from future generations. Such as these two, which ended up appearing in Ruby and Sapphire as Gorebyss and Huntail respectively:

Or this one, which clearly inspired Lickitung’s actual evolution from generation 4:

Or even this one, which seems to be Happiny from generation 4.

Again, it’s an interesting look at how things change around in development and shows that scrapped Pokemon from one generation often ended up being kept and reused for a later one. Huh, wonder what other video games series do something similar? After all, Shigeru Miyamoto did say that cancelled Mario games inspired Pikmin, and scrapped dungeons from The Legend of Zelda The Wind Waker were apparently retooled into dungeons in future titles in the series…

Either way, you can find the full list of Pokemon and their sprites on this page here, so go and check it out if you’re into that sort of thing:

For everyone else? Well let’s look at the locations now…

Locations

Or at least, the one location we actually have information about. You see, this is the current map for Pokemon Gold and Silver:

Whereas this is the one from the prototype:

Yeah, Johto changed a lot in development, didn’t it?

What’s more, it seems the whole concept of the game’s region as a whole changed in development too. Why? Because the map you see above is clearly based on Japan as a whole, with the towns and cities representing areas in the real-life country. This implies that at some point in the series’ development, Nintendo and Game Freak had plans to turn whole countries into regions for the games, with future games likely taking the player to areas based on other real-life countries much earlier than generation 5. It’s an interesting difference in world building and makes us kinda wonder how future games would have worked along those lines.

Would Kalos have been the whole of France? Would Unova have been the entire USA?

Probably, and that would have made for some very different games to the ones we actually got. There’s a haunted wasteland route, a tropical island city, more gatehouses than ever before, all of which can be seen on the full map here.

It definitely seems like an interesting world, and one that had even more variety than the actual game’s region did.

Still, enough about maps and locales for the time being, onto something else. Like say, some of the moves scrapped from the game…

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