In the past few hours, an anonymous user on 4chan posted screenshots of a presumed beta version of Pokemon Gold. Said leak displayed screenshots of unused Pokemon, and a beta titlescreen.

At approximately 3am EST, said leaker releases the ROM into the wild, and a team reveals that they were working on translating and bug fixing the aforementioned ROM. Coinciding with the leak, user Sanqui on Twitter releases a WIP spreadsheet containing all the data researched and documented by the team thus far:

[Tweet removed by @shaunj66 - contained copyrighted material]

SOURCE

 

[RattletraPM]

I still don't see the point? We are still talking about a "game". So what if the developers had change of mind? It will not effect us in anyway right now beside "aaah that pokemon should have stayed".
Even if it turned out to be an complete different game with mix of Digimon and Dragonball Z characters, it still would not effect our experience of Pokemon because we played the final version.

That's not the point. Call me a huge nerd on this one and I'd agree on you, but making videogames nowadays could be considered an art. It's still not recognized as something like painting, classical literature and "high arts" like those, but at the same time why shouldn't it be considered art when artists, musicians and story writers are involved as well as a plethora of many different people?

In this regard, it's always interesting to look back at prototypes of any game (including ones that didn't have as much success as stuff like Mario, Zelda or Pokémon). It's always interesting to see why the developers decided to cut something, change something else or even rebuild the entire game from the ground up. Not only it's a way to appreciate the art of game development but it's also a great way to learn the tricks behind it as well.

Plus, as I said, this is true for any game. Look ad GameHut's various videos about unreleased Sonic R prototypes, for example - that game is considered to be a bad Sonic game yet it's a real treat to see him talking about it's development and the hardships the devs had to go through due to hardware limitations.

 

[migles]

Even if it turned out to be an complete different game with mix of Digimon and Dragonball Z characters, it still would not effect our experience of Pokemon because we played the final version.

there was a saying
"the destination is not important it's the journey that counts"
giving us this material, lets us experience and understand how the game turned to be, and i fucking loving seing the johto being totally different in the begining compared to the new one
you are basically saying "i don't fucking want to fuck know the history of the internet\computers, all it matters is i have internet and computers"
yeah we already enjoyed the final game to hell, it has been like 20 years? if we find this lost stuff we can experience and have fun with a new part of it

i understand its just a game, but yeah i sure love and enjoy to see the development and changed stuff from the first drafts until the final product. doesn't matter if pokemon, zelda mario, or any game in general.
now please stop being a douche and let others have their fun, people are enjoying seing this lost content, doesn't mean you also have to.

 

[RattletraPM]

and i fucking loving seing the johto being totally different in the begining compared to the new one

Amen to that, I've loved Gen II because it felt so much different in respect to everything else - even back then when Gen III came out and Gen IV was just announced.
Plus this prototype made me respect it even more due to how much stuff was cut and then reused in much later games. We all already knew about the honey thing, but Leafeon and Canvale city too? That's just crazy.

 

[lolboy]

In this regard, it's always interesting to look back at prototypes of any game (including ones that didn't have as much success as stuff like atMario, Zelda or Pokémon). It's always interesting to see why the developers decided to cut something, change something else or even rebuild the entire game from the ground up.

giving us this material, lets us experience and understand how the game turned to be, and i fucking loving seing the johto being totally different in the begining compared to the new one
you are basically saying

Let me clear up things. I never said prototypes are boring or that they are useless. I was referring to some people taking it to far(not only here on gbatemp).
Maybe bad example: "We were supposed to go to {LOCATION A} but because they changed that we needed to go to {LOCATION X} and for that reason {PERSON} never give us {ITEM}".

 

[M7L7NK7]

Really wish a Gen1 prototype would leak, they said that some pokemon didn't make the cut so that would be interesting to see what made it to gen 2

 

[pasc]

Yummy... unreleased... I like the sound of that word.

Please excuse me now, I need to pitch an idea for "unreleased cereals" to a certain K-ompany.

 

[MarKSlasH]

If you get to the game start and options screen and back out the flames turn into musical notes. They alternate between flames and notes everytime you go back. Anyone else noticed it?

 

[gumbyx84]

I still don't see the point? We are still talking about a "game". So what if the developers had change of mind? It will not effect us in anyway right now beside "aaah that pokemon should have stayed".
Even if it turned out to be an complete different game with mix of Digimon and Dragonball Z characters, it still would not effect our experience of Pokemon because we played the final version.

Cool. You don't care. Then don't read the thread or post. Let those who are excited by a demo thought lost to time enjoy discussing it.

Let me clear up things. I never said prototypes are boring or that they are useless. I was referring to some people taking it to far(not only here on gbatemp).
Maybe bad example: "We were supposed to go to {LOCATION A} but because they changed that we needed to go to {LOCATION X} and for that reason {PERSON} never give us {ITEM}".

How is that taking it "too far"? Discussing how much the game changed from this demo to the final release is interesting to some of us. People do the same when original screenplays and unaired tv pilots are found.

If you get to the game start and options screen and back out the flames turn into musical notes. They alternate between flames and notes everytime you go back. Anyone else noticed it?

I noticed that too. Didn't think to post about it though

Reminds me: haven't seen it mentioned here but in debug mode there are a few TMs your can use. One of them is Sketch (believe it's the last TM in the list), which I wasn't expecting. Same goes for the 99 rare candies

 

[LeifEricson]

Interesting how many more baby Pokemon they had planned (there's 9 that were never released) as well as how many are (arguably) versions of Pokemon released much later (Mime Jr., Popplio line, Tangrowth, Lickilicky, Leafeon...)

 

[Deleted User]

A whole lot of baby pokemon that were scrapped...

or you could say..

aborted.

 

[Sakitoshi]

funny, in my everdrive x7 the game doesn't work

everdrive confirmed to be shit!!
nah. my guess is that the everdrive uses an internal list to choose correct compatibility modes for each game and this betas are obviously not on the list so the everdrive is applying a wrong mode.
the ems gb usb smartcard 64m (that is what I have and works) runs the games at bare metal, so is the same as an official cartridge.

 

[lolboy]

Cool. You don't care. Then don't read the thread or post...

Then why are you replying to my post? Move along sir nothing to see here.

 

[GerbilSoft]

Some emulators care about checksums, some like No$gmb warn but allow you to continue, some don't care at all

The weird thing is that the unfixed rom has a wrong header checksum (or so I read), meaning it would never have worked on real hardware?!

The checksum is correct; what's wrong is the mapper ID. It should be $10 (MBC3+TIMER+RAM+BATTERY), but it's actually $03 (MBC1+RAM+BATTERY). Wrong MBC results in the game crashing on startup.

This doesn't affect the original cartridge because the cartridge has an actual MBC3 chip on it. It only affects emulators and flashcarts that use the header value to determine what MBC to emulate.

 

[gumbyx84]

funny, in my everdrive x7 the game doesn't work (when putting the game directly from the download)
but when i tried in the recomended emulator

everdrive confirmed to be shit!!
nah. my guess is that the everdrive uses an internal list to choose correct compatibility modes for each game and this betas are obviously not on the list so the everdrive is applying

The roms with the header fix work fine on my og EverDrive GB

 

[SaberLilly]

Man I am excited for these to have appeared and I can't wait for them to be translated into English. Mostly for the sake of pure curiosity, but I was also only 7 and much like the rest of the community knew nothing of these demos aside from the various videos and little information tidbits, so this is like a brand new experience almost. Also of interest I noticed that these roms are the exact same size as normal Gen 1 roms, its probably of no consequence, just something i myself noticed.

EDIT:

https://gyazo.com/f0bdf684bbdedbd6f12b1add98dfae5e (Just because I could)

 

[gumbyx84]

Just got home and tried the Silver prototype rom (Fixed Header ver 2) on my EverDrive GB. Sadly, it won't load. It does load on my phone, so I'll be play it there.

Has anyone with a EverDrive, ElCheapo, or a similar device gotten it to work?

 

[Kallus]

A sprite of "silver's mom" and "evil oak" are in the rom. Evil oak as in the evil oak on that one pokemon card

 

[Sakitoshi]

EDIT:

https://gyazo.com/f0bdf684bbdedbd6f12b1add98dfae5e (Just because I could)

Get on my level.

 

[RattletraPM]

Get on my level.

Please.

 

[Sakitoshi]

Please.

I would post a picture of my nokia 6630 running it... If I could find it.