Looking Back On Fake Pokémon Leaks
A time-honoured tradition of the Pokémon fanbase is to just straight-up lie about the beloved game franchise. From the first rumoured sightings of the mysterious Pokémon number 151, Mew, under the truck just north of the S.S. Anne, to those on the playground who were convinced that they’d be able to play with the elusive Pikablu if they only put their Raichu in the right conditions to evolve, it’s not really a Pokémon game if somebody’s not making stuff up about it. (Nothing was under that truck, for the record, and “Pikablu” turned out to be the Johto Pokémon Marill.) Here is a short exploration of a few of my favourite such fakes.
Ever since Pokémon Yellow set the standard for each Pokémon generation to have a third, bonus game combining the best features of the prior two, people have been excited to see what awaited them a year or two after the new games came out. This excitement would usually lead to speculation among the likes of this fan-made cover for Pokémon Z, which matches the style of the Pokémon X and Y covers pretty perfectly, and makes it look like real Nintendo art. Pokémon Z never ended up being made, and we may never know why for sure, but it’s likely because Game Freak spent the time they would have used to develop it on piloting experimental new franchises, none of which ended up very successful.
There’s also this beautiful starter concept art, which was posted anonymously to 4chan and fairly widely accepted as a possible leak of the real starter plans for Generation 8. It was mainly so successful because it looked so similar to the actual starter art which was leaked two years prior in the runup to the release of the Generation 7 games. Like those real leaks, this fake used differentiation between the different writing styles of Japanese to set either a cuter or cooler tone for different starters, and depicted the fake starters in multiple different poses and positions that would not carry over to the Sugimori art. The ruse was kept up for days before the artist, an Italian Pokémon fan going by the username 50ShadesOfHeliolisk, owned up to being the true artist and having had a Japanese friend help with the lettering. The confession post ended by saying that “if you want you can start throwing all the insults I deserve at me” — but personally, I think such a good ruse deserves applause, not insults.
People do make “fake leak” art that isn’t meant to be taken seriously at all: this cover for Pokémon Gun (above) and this fake scan announcing two new Pokémon lines (below) are simply funny or interesting concept art for things that the wider Pokémon fanbase never expected to be real. I mean, really — can you actually imagine Nintendo publishing Pokémon Gun? The amount of emails and phone calls they would receive from concerned parents would be astronomical.
Still, it’s fun to look back on all the times that we as a community got bamboozled by a particularly talented artist, and wonder what the next big fake might be. My bet is on more starter predictions — whatever you come up with, it can’t be as bad as some of the things people proposed to fill in the silhouettes of the Unova starters!
