If you hear what sounds like a thousand dogs sniffing at something this weekend, it’s because there was an apparent massive leak of Nintendo development assets full of source code and other files for a variety of classic games including Star Fox 2, Yoshi’s Island, and Super Mario World. There’s a sprite sheet with Luigi giving the fourth wall the bird. It’s good stuff.
Among these files (and what is more relevant to this site) is a presentation from 2004 that outlines a proposed Pokemon MMO for the Game Boy Advance. The project, which was proposed by the Chinese company iQue Ltd., included online trading, battling, and chat, an online tournament feature that references using code from Pokemon Colosseum, and online Pokemon capturing and treasure hunts. Most of the online features would have used a link cable to connect the GBA to a PC, using the GBA as a controller and the PC as a screen.
The game also included plans for an offline single-player mode with gameplay features from and a story based on FireRed and LeafGreen, while connecting the game to the online server would update which Pokemon are on the map based on the player’s regional IP address, along with a proposed regional “weather concept.” These changes would take effect in offline mode and would only update when the game was connected to the server again.
Finally, the proposal included details of a hatching system which would create an egg based on a number of variables such as the server’s real time clock, recent weather reports, and the birth rate of nearby Pokemon.
We’ve found a video of someone reading the proposal presentation online, though we apologize in advance for the “quality” of this person’s mic. Still, even if you’re an audiophile, this is an interesting peek at what was in the works at the time; you probably should look at it before Nintendo strikes it from the internet.
