A piece of Pokemon history just went public, and nobody was ever meant to see it.
A 20-year-old internal Game Freak documentary about the making of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl surfaced online last month, and eagle-eyed fans have already pulled more than 100 scrapped and early Gen-4 designs out of it.
The 43-minute film, titled "Make All," was produced for internal use during Sinnoh's roughly two-year development starting in January 2004. It's entirely in Japanese, with no official English version, so the community has been translating and combing through it by hand.
It reached the public through a purchase. A rare DVD copy surfaced on Japanese marketplace Mercari earlier this year priced around 82,000 yen, roughly $500, per Dexerto, and archivist and Pokemon historian Lewtwo obtained a copy legitimately, via Kotaku. Fans then went frame by frame to recover design sheets sitting in the background of office shots. The whole thing went up on the Internet Archive last month.
Turtwig began life as a four-legged, Grass-type armadillo before settling into the shell-backed turtle everyone knows. Infernape's early concept was a heavy, muscular baboon with a flaming tail, a world away from the bipedal martial artist that shipped. And Piplup, of all things, once wore a foam parka and an actual crown before Game Freak pared it back to the plucky little penguin.
Plenty of familiar faces were changed... There's a yellow-colored Gastrodon, a skinnier Purugly that looked a lot more like Glameow while keeping the coiled tail, a proto-Bidoof, and an early Dialga design that Kotaku's write-up called freaky.
Some designs never got a number in the Pokedex at all. The documentary shows a Delibird evolution, a Lapras pre-evolution, a Stantler pre-evolution, a possible third stage for Swellow, baby forms shared by Plusle and Minun, and a two-stage sentient sandcastle family (fans are already wondering if that seed grew into Gen-7's Sandygast years later). Others read like fever dreams: a saber-toothed jackal with icicle fangs, a rocky Pokemon shaped like a train, and a permanently sleeping bear the team called Yasuraguma.
Delibird has waited a long time for that one. It arrived in Gen 2 with Gold and Silver in 1999, and across nine generations and 25-plus years it has never gotten an evolution, a pre-evolution, or anything else. It's still sitting there alone in the Pokedex. Turns out it came closer than anybody knew!
Nintendo, Game Freak, and The Pokemon Company have stayed completely silent so far. There's been no statement and no takedown, and the Internet Archive copy is still live, a surprisingly light touch from a company that usually moves fast on this kind of thing.
For a studio this tight lipped, a deep look inside its process is rare. This is the first real window into how Sinnoh came together, 20 years after the fact, and it's the kind of lost-media recovery that gets the preservation community excited. The mood online has been equal parts fascination and mourning, with "we were robbed" showing up under just about every thread.
Leaks like this have become somewhat of a tradition at this point. The Spaceworld '97 demo of Gold and Silver leaked in May 2018 and turned up more than 45 beta Pokemon that never shipped. Then the October 2024 "Teraleak" dumped roughly a terabyte of internal Game Freak material, from source code to concept art. This one is a little different in that those were breaches. This one is a physical DVD somebody bought on a marketplace, and Game Freak made it.
Diamond and Pearl hit Japan on September 28, 2006 and North America the following April, moved a million copies in their first five days stateside, and have sold 17.67 million worldwide. Gen 4 added 107 new Pokemon and brought in the physical/special split, the change that stopped a move's damage category being dictated by its type and still shapes how competitive Pokemon is played today. The 2021 remakes, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, have since cleared 15 million of their own.
So which one hurts the most to lose? Armadillo Turtwig, the yellow Gastrodon, or that Delibird evolution that almost was?
Let us know in the comments below!