Prerelease:Pokémon Gold and Silver

This page details pre-release information and/or media for Pokémon Gold and Silver.

Pokémon Gold and Silver had a long development phase marked by repeated delays and a shift from Game Boy to Game Boy Color. The games went through a significant overhaul between their first reveal in 1997 and their release date, leaving traces of a very different game. Despite the trouble it went through during development, it still managed to be an enjoyable game, as well as one of the most expansive entries in the series.

Development Timeline

Development of Gold and Silver took significantly longer than Game Freak originally prepared for, which as it turns out was due to several reasons. Indeed, much of the staff was allocated to working on localizing the first two games, and the development team of Gold and Silver only had about four programmers, which was similar in size to the development team for Red and Green but with the added challenge of creating several new features for the games.

1996

• February - Development of the games begins almost immediately after the release of Red and Green.
• July - Pokémon 2 is first publicly announced.

1997

• April 1 - The Pokémon anime debuts, with Ho-Oh making an appearance near the end of the first episode.
• June - Nintendo's official Pokémon 2 page, archived in June 1997, advertises an initial release date of the end of 1997.
• September 5 - The week's issue of Famitsu reports that Pokémon 2 will be released in Fall 1997.
• November 15 - The demos for Pokémon Gold and Silver at Space World '97 are compiled.
• November 21-23 - Playable demos of Pokémon Gold and Silver debut at Space World '97. Around that time, the release date was adjusted to March 1998.
• December 16 - The "Pokémon Shock" event occurs, causing the anime to be halted and delayed for a significant amount of time, and potentially impacting development of games and merchandise.

1998

• January-March - The demos of Gold and Silver from Space World '97 are showcased at the World Hobby Fair in various locations around Japan.
• March -
  • Nintendo's official Space World '97 page advertises a revised release date of the last third of March.
  • The official Nintendo webpage for Gold and Silver announces that the games will be postponed with no definitive end date.
• May 6 - The original Japan game map featured in Space World 97, alongside all internal Pokémon designs are backed up internally. The original map is scrapped and work by now has begun on the earliest version of the Johto map.

1999

• April - The May 1999 issue of CoroCoro is released, reintroducing Gold and Silver to the public.
• April 14 - Pokémon Pinball is released in Japan, where music from Gold and Silver is featured.
• July 17 - Pokémon the Movie 2000 is released in theaters. The film marks the public debut of Lugia, created specifically for the movie by scriptwriter Takeshi Shudo. Luiga becomes so popular among audiences that Game Freak unilaterally decide to put it in Pokémon Gold and Silver, much to Shudo's surprise and discontent.
• August 17 - The demos for Pokémon Gold and Silver at Space World '99 are compiled.
• August 27-29 - The games, reported to be 90% complete, are showcased at Space World '99.
• October 17 - Final build dates for the Japanese version of Pokémon Gold and Silver.
• November 21 - Pokémon Gold and Silver are released in Japan.

2000

• April 24 - Earliest known prototype for the English version of Pokémon Gold and Silver
• July 7 - Final compile date for the English version of Pokémon Gold and Silver
• October 11 - Pokémon Gold and Silver are released in North America.
• October 13 - Pokémon Gold and Silver are released in Australia.

2001

• April 6 - Pokémon Gold and Silver are released in Europe.

2002

• April 24 - Pokémon Gold and Silver are released in Korea.

Sub-Pages

Early Development 1996-1998. The original incarnation of Gold and Silver, prior to being reworked for the GBC.

Late Development 1998-1999. The retooled version of Gold and Silver we're all familiar with.

Concepts

Legendary Beasts

While the legendary beasts did exist in the Space World '97 proto, their designs were wildly different, namely looking much more like dogs, and sporting placeholder names. It's then more than likely that they were first made by a different designer, before ultimately being reworked by artist Muneo Saitō. A 2012 tweet by Ken Sugimori led Saitō to explain his thought process when it came to designing the three beasts.

PM2F_244.cgx	990613 - SW99	990917 - Final	Crystal

For Entei, Saitō seems to have had a clear idea of its design from the start, picturing the embodiment of a volcano, with "volcanic smoke rising from behind its head, a king with a dignified beard". The "king" aspect was accentuated by appending the character for "emperor" (帝, tei) to Entei's name, which up until August of 1999 still only consisted of "En" (炎, "Flame"). The aforementioned beard, however, took more iterating to get right. An early scratchpad sprite shows a more straightforward beard, which incorporates a lighter fur patch in the middle. Then, somewhere before June 13th 1999, this was revised into a fluffier mane, underneath which sits a long patch of light fur. The latter was ditched in the final sprite, only keeping the "mane beard", though subsequent promotional Sugimori artwork returned to the earlier layered look, also adding a set of long sideburns, both of which were accounted for in Crystal onwards.

While being a regal maned creature, Saitō didn't want to go with a simple lion design, instead opting for one which could still stand on its own, having both feline and canine characteristics, not unlike the protective figures of the komainu or the Chinese shishi. When it came to Raikou and Suicune, Saitō tried to make them mesh better with Entei, and decided to draw inspiration from a tiger and a leopard respectively, while still having the focus being that they are "nature spirits that carry their respective elements on their backs".

Suicune is described as having come together easily, and it appears the rest of the team was satisfied with it, since only its palette was tweaked somewhere between June 13th and August 17th 1999, being made more saturated. Earlier Pokémon data refers to it as the "Milky Way Pokémon" (lit. "Heavenly River Pokémon"), though the final games went with "Aurora Pokémon", and replaced the "divine" aspect of its Pokédex entry with a note about it being the incarnation of northern winds. As for its name, it was updated the same time as Entei, with the character for "monarch" (君, kun) being added to the earlier "Sui" (水, "Water").

990613 - SW99	990917 - Final	Crystal

Raikou is the one whose design took the most pondering. Saitō states that an earlier take of his consisted of "a blue [Raikou] with a drum on its back", which is clearly based on the Shinto god of thunder, Raijin, who is depicted surrounded by drums. Only Suicune remained blue, Raikou becoming yellow, and ditching the drum in favor of a stylized purple raincloud. A drawing of a blue Raikou-like creature was featured as promotional material for a 2014 chara-design lecture held by Muneo Saitō, though it was not labeled as concept art (unlike another showcased piece), and thus it's more likely to be a modern Pokémon-style illustration used as a visual example. We do however have early visuals for Raikou, with it originally sporting much longer, reddish fangs, making it clear it was a sabertooth tiger. The fangs were ultimately made white, and shrunken significantly, though Sugimori brought them back for his promotional artwork, on top of generally redesigning Raikou's head and color scheme. Lastly, its name was finalized the same day as Entei and Suicune's, when the character for "lord" (公, kou) was added to "Rai" (雷, "Thunder").

(Source: Collage of tweets by Muneo Saitō)

Bellossom

Bellossom's Gold and Silver artwork, which was made before the final release of the games, show that it was originally planned to have dark blue skin similar to one of its evolutionary relatives. Given how the earlier version of Bellossom found in the Space World '97 proto even shares this trait, this seems to prove that this was the original intent before it was ultimately changed. While preceding the controversy regarding Jynx's skin color, the design team possibly decided to change Bellossom's in fear it'd be seen as questionable given its Polynesian influences, though this color change could have also been made because the design team wasn't satisfied with how it looked.

Regarding in-game sprites, the color change seems to have happened somewhere after mid-June of 1999, as by the time the Space World '99 demo was compiled the sprite with blue skin and red flowers/petals had already been repurposed as Bellossom's shiny sprite. The anime's model sheet using the design with green skin was shown in a mid-April 1999 release of CoroCoro Comic, and a few issues later merchandise depicting Bellossom's final green-skinned design is shown, implying that the color change probably happened soon after the artwork was finalized.

Unnamed sheep

In an early 2011 interview with @Gamer magazine, Junichi Masuda and Ken Sugimori revealed that they thought about designing a Pokémon after the first cloned sheep, Dolly, but ultimately decided against it in fear that it'd be deemed "too controversial" as a concept for a Pokémon. Given how Dolly's existence was revealed to the world on 22 February 1997, when Gold and Silver had already been worked on for a year, it's then possible they originally intended for this Pokémon to be included in those games.

While no physical description of this Pokémon was provided, it's possible this concept was never given much thought. However, if that isn't the case there is a chance that how they first envisioned this "Dolly-inspired" Pokémon to look ended up inspiring the design of either Mareep or Flaaffy, two sheep-inspired Pokémon introduced in Generation II.

(Source: Bulbanews)

Lugia

Lugia was solely designed by Takeshi Shudo, who at the time was the head writer for the Pokémon anime, as well as the scriptwriter for The Power of One, the second Pokémon movie, which was released in July of 1999. As revealed by Shudo, Lugia was commissioned for the movie, and he was quite surprised to find out that it was later included in the games. The name "Lugia" was chosen in a large meeting where even game development staff attended, though in order to keep an element of surprise Lugia was only referred to as "Pokémon X" before its public reveal. While Lugia's design was seemingly finalized from the start, a Sugimori conceptual sketch for the second movie does show Lugia with a slightly earlier design. Namely, it is depicted with an X-shaped motif atop its stomach. Given how Ho-Oh has a Y-shaped silhouette, this may have been done to accentuate Lugia's appearance into a more noticeable X, thus making the two more complimentary. Lugia also only has six back spikes, as seen in an internal sprite archive dated June 13 1999.

Lugia was then retroactively envisioned as a partner for Ho-Oh when it came to its inclusion in Gold and Silver, with a Tin Tower event file from March 1999 being the earliest known trace of its inclusion in the games. Additionally, in a November 2009 issue of Nintendo DREAM, game designer Morimoto Shigeki gave more details regarding Lugia's significance in Gold and Silver. In this interview, he namely said that while Ho-Oh and Lugia do not have a direct connection in the story, they were envisioned as being "[...] born in the world of Pokémon Gold and Silver for its new feature, the time system, giving us the day and night cycle. Thus, they represent the sun and the moon, day and night."

Region Map

The team originally had troubles figuring out what the world of Pokémon Gold and Silver would look like. The 2000 book "Pokémon Story" states that the size of the Generation I games was based on how far Satoshi Tajiri could ride his bike as a child, whereas the size of the Generation II region map was based on how far he could go by taking the train. This explains the more expansive approach taken early on in development, as seen in the Spaceworld 1997 demo, where region is styled after the entire island of Japan. Though ironically enough the Magnet Train is missing from this iteration of the games, only being implemented somewhere in early 1998.

That version's a completely different game from what made it to store shelves. [...] The first world map was very grand in scale and based on the entirety of Japan. However, this meant we couldn’t spare much cartridge space for each individual town, nor put much distance between them, so it all felt much more compact than the Kanto games.

The February 2000 issue of 64Dream Magazine contains an interview with Game Freak programmer Tetsuya Watanabe which sheds some light on the reasons this design was scaled down. As shown by development assets, while the original "Japan-sized" region was worked on up until mid-1998, by October of that same year it had been completely revamped, now baring a layout close to the final one.

I took over direction of Gold & Silver from Tajiri, then went to Kyoto to create my vision for the Johto region. I remember staying at a hotel, visiting temples to gather information, then going back to the hotel and calling everyone, and we'd work out what to put on the map. For example, when I went to the Pagoda at Toji Temple (the East temple), I heard that a long time ago there used to be a West temple as well. I thought "Ah, I want to use that," so I added the Burned Tower. Once I got back home to Tokyo, I had a good idea of what Johto would look like.

The November 2009 issue of Nintendo Dream magazine, meanwhile, has an account from Junichi Masuda where he describes his thought process behind the revamped Johto region. The team would now use the Kansai region as a basis, with Johto even reusing its name earlier in development, like how Kanto shares the name of its real life inspiration. The name "KANSA" appears as the internal name for the overworld tilesets, though the name "Johto" (ジョウト) would ultimately being chosen, based on the kanji "城都" (Jōto), meaning "capital of castles", after Kansai's many historical landmarks.