Four seasons of the anime lived in Sinnoh. Ash, Brock and Dawn walked it from 2007 all the way to Sinnoh League Victors in 2010, and by the end those starters were characters, not sprites!
So it's a genuine jolt to find out how close we came to a completely different set of them.
A Game Freak documentary called "Make All," shot for staff eyes only while Pokemon Diamond & Pearl was in development, has resurfaced after twenty years. Fans digging through its 43 minutes have counted over a hundred early and abandoned Gen-4 concepts, most of them visible on design sheets pinned up behind the staff in ordinary office footage. Nobody hacked anything to get it, either: archivist Lewtwo bought the DVD, as Kotaku detailed, after a copy went up on Japanese marketplace Mercari earlier this year, per Dexerto.
Start with Piplup. The anime built half of Dawn's screen presence on that penguin's stubborn little ego, and the early sketches give it a foam parka and a crown, styling it as tiny royalty instead of the scrappy underdog who never wanted to stay in its Poke Ball.
Turtwig fares no better in the early passes, drawn as a four-legged armadillo long before anyone landed on the sapling and the shell. Chimchar's line ends up somewhere stranger still, with the sheets showing a bulky primate where Infernape's lean fighter eventually went. Ash's Chimchar arc, all that abuse-and-recovery material with Paul, would read completely differently on a creature built like that.
Others in the regional dex got shuffled around too, among them a Dialga sketch Kotaku describes as freaky, a yellow Gastrodon, an unfinished Bidoof, and a Purugly still carrying more Glameow in its frame.
Some concepts never made it to the dex at all. A sleeping bear the staff called Yasuraguma. A jackal with icicle fangs. Something rocky shaped like a train, plus a two-part living sandcastle, baby forms shared between Plusle and Minun, a third stage for Swellow, and pre-evolutions for both Lapras and Stantler.
And an evolution for Delibird. Twenty-five years after its debut in Gold and Silver, that bird is still a one-stage Pokemon with nothing above or below it in the dex, which fans have complained about for most of those twenty-five years. Sinnoh was apparently its shot, and it missed!
The rights holders have let it be, which is the surprising part. Weeks on from the upload, Nintendo, Game Freak and The Pokemon Company have all left it alone.
Meanwhile, Pokemon: Winds and Waves is currently rolling out 30th anniversary artwork for its own new starters, the trio a future generation of fans will grow up defending, while this tape shows the discarded drafts of the last set that managed it.
Sinnoh remains a high-water mark for the franchise. The pair sold 17.67 million copies from their September 2006 Japanese launch, added 107 Pokemon, and got remade in 2021 as Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl for another 15 million. Dawn, meanwhile, is still near the top of most rankings of Ash's traveling companions two decades on.
What makes the tape unusual is simply that it exists. Studios rarely film their own development, and rarer still does that footage escape twenty years later with the rejected artwork legible in the background. Fans have been translating the Japanese by hand since it went up, and new sheets are still being picked out of the frames.
Would you have picked parka Piplup over the one we got?
Let us know in the comments below!
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