He was arrested and sentenced by March 2019 to 15 months in prison (suspended) and five years of probation. He shared different pieces of the material with people he knew from "scene" groups and research communities like Video Game Preservation Collective (VGPC) and Glitch City Labs (GCL), but did not reveal how he had acquired them. In March 2018, Zammis Clark (aka wack0, Riley, Raylee, slipstream, RoL/Ring of Lightning, Stackout, or _) hacked into Nintendo's internal network (having previously breached Vtech and Microsoft) and acquired gigabytes (if not terabytes) of material, much of it related to Pokémon. Gen 3 and 4 also had some revised and unused Pokémon, although Game Freak may have refined their process by then, so designs wouldn't have much implemented without being finalized. Gen 2 also had "several hundred" designs (reusing some from the Gen 1 rejects) before settling on 100 more. There were over 190 initial designs, of which 151 became the Gen 1 Pokémon. Probably the most popular early designs are for the actual Pokémon creatures aka drafts, prototypes, scrapped or "beta" designs. Some Capumon material has been known for years before the "gigaleaks" even got started. Game Freak has kept many of their early design documents from that period, and occasionally we've seen glimpses of them in interviews or official publications. " Capsule Monsters", or Capumon, was the original name for Satoshi Tajiri's game idea that became Pokémon. Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! - Proto.Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire - Prerelease.Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen - Prerelease.Kakeru - Memories of the dawn of Pokémon sites on the Internet (Japanese).Glitch City Wiki - Trivia about Pokémon development.In short, don't expect doxxing or reveals of people "hoarding" anything.)ĭevelopment timelines and further analysis: Everything here is put together from what's still publicly available, with some references to things that no longer are so. 4chan posts naturally disappear, with only some being archived Discord servers like /ppg/ and TCRF have reorganized or gone dark and internal discussion among the involved parties was never public in the first place. (Much of the original discussion from when these events occurred is no longer available. I've started this timeline of relevant events to document just how our available information about Pokémon has expanded from all of those sources. By now the internet has eliminated the "playground rumors" from early Pokémon, and the initial drama of the leaks has settled. There have also been rumors, mistakes, and lies, sometimes with good intentions. And over the past few years, leaks from Nintendo's 2018 server breach have revealed a lot more. Fans have also discovered undocumented data in the games through exploiting glitches, reverse-engineering, and dumping ROMs. Game Freak has released tidbits of information about their prototypes and betas in the decades since Pokémon first began around 1989 as "Capsule Monsters", or "Capumon".