Note: Before we start, I want to note that as I've worked through this period of development, I've slightly changed how I'm defining this section. I initially said that Period 4a consisted of every Pokemon created before May 1999; however, that turned out to be a difficult marker to always quantify, and it also led to a very large section that didn't properly distinguish between Pokemon created at the beginning of the 1999 reboot and those created later. As a result, I've moved to a slightly different definition: Period 4a consists of every Pokemon which predates our first snapshot of rebooted development, on April 1st, 1999. This ends of leading to slight reshuffling of the Pokemon I've already covered, and of the list that I provided at the end of Era III. Most notably, Sentret and Furret should be the first two Pokemon in Period 4b, as we know that they were first given stats twelve days after April 1st, on April 13th. Likewise, I'm going to begin this section by discussing Sunkern, but looking through the data, it becomes obvious that some version of Sunkern existed very early in the reboot, potentially even predating 1999. As a result, it should probably be earlier in Period 4a, around Heracross. I'm sure that I'm the only one who cares all that much about the timeline I'm trying to construct of the creation of these reboot-mon, but I want to do my best to be as transparent as possible when I change my mind about things. When I eventually create the chart of Generation II development that includes these guys, these changes will be included. ID X16: SunkernSunkern, the seed Pokemon we all know and love, turns out to have had a surprisingly bumpy development. It appears that the team created and mostly finished Sunkern, then decided they didn’t like the idea, completely wiping Sunkern from the data. However, late the day Sunkern reappeared, ready to take its rightful place in the Pokedex. They buried Sunkern, but they didn’t know it was a seed. Obviously Sunkern’s origins are straightforward. It looks like a seed; specifically, the stripes on Sunkern make it look like a Sunflower seed. Which, of course, makes perfect sense, as it was created to be the pre-evolution of Sunflora, the Sunflower Pokemon. It’s Japanese name, “Himanuts” is just a portmanteau of Himawari (sunflower) and nut; It’s English name is probably a portmanteau that means “kernel of a sunflower.” So there’s not much that’s tricky going on here. The Pokemon we'll look at next, Shuckle, has a concept that seems muddled from start to finish, Sunkern’s exactly what it says on the tin. There’s a lot of evidence that Sunkern was one of the very first Pokemon designed at the beginning of the 1999 reboot, or even possibly before that in late 1998. For instance, on April 1st, 1999 (once again, our first snapshot of rebooted development) Sunkern’s already gotten unique stats and a Grass-typing, while Sunflora is still using the flat 50s in every stat that it had in Spaceworld ’97. It also evolved into Sunflora at level 20, and it had a unique name: Bayleef, which was eventually repurposed for, well, Bayleef. In retrospect, I should have put Sunkern at the very beginning of Period 4a, right next to Heracross. The reason I didn’t initially due this was because I was thrown off by Sunkern's weird development history. Despite the gameplay (ie, the stats, evolution, and typing) of Sunkern being completely done by April 1999, we have no evidence of what its sprite looked like, or if it even had one. And then, by June, Sunkern no longer had a name (only called Mitei 01, the placeholder the team used for blank slots) and we know that it had only placeholder stats by the end of July. So Sunkern got deleted! And then it's back, in the middle of August, this time with a goofy joke sprite that looks like a little dude with a sprout coming out of his mouth. Here's the sprite, along with RacieB's wonderful art of it: What an absolute goofball! This art for Sunkern was clearly made in a rush, and probably only meant as a placeholder while the team decided what Sunkern would really look like. There's a bunch of goofy sketch sprites like this in Spaceworld '99, where this Sunkern comes from, all of which have no shading and look like just a basic idea of what the Pokemon might look like. In particular, I think there's enough similarities between the sketchy early sprite of Shuckle and this sprite of Sunkern to speculate that there might be a connection. We know Shigeki Morimoto made Shuckle; maybe he also designed Sunkern? Obviously the early Shuckle sprite has a bit more work put into it, but the eyes and mouth are done almost identically, and both don't bother with a black outline around parts of the sketch (the sprout's stem, Shuckle's white spots). The question that arises, though, is why the team needed to come up with a new sprite at all. Sunkern doesn't have a sprite in the June 1999 spritebank we have, so it's very possible that it never had one, and only got this sketchy one after being reimplemented into the game. But as I wrote above, Sunkern was basically finished in April 1999, which implies it had to have been using some sprite or another. In addition, in the June spritebank, Sunkern isn't using an old sprite from Spaceworld '97 as a placeholder, like almost every other Pokemon without a sprite is using (see Shuckle's backsprite, Girafarig-3, Yanma-2, Pupitar and Larvitar, and others). Instead, it has a shadow outline of Pikachu, with a green palette. This implies there was a sprite there--probably one using the green palette the Pikachu outline is using--and it had been actively deleted. So what was there? I’ve said before that the strange eye-flower that was ID #404 in the Korean Index may have been an early Sunkern. That sprite didn’t appear in Spaceworld ’97 at all and neither did any form of Sunkern. Sunflora was a single stage Pokemon with the Grass/Psychic typing, if you'll remember. But it is possible that Sunkern, with #404's sprite, could have been in an earlier build, removed before Spaceworld '97, and readded later, probably during 1998, a hazy period of development that we don't have much data on. While this seems complicated, it also wouldn’t surprise me at all that the development team went back and forth on Sunkern’s inclusion in SW97, given how they almost deleted it again in 1999. Saying that, I’m skeptical that ID 404 was ever Sunkern, mostly because of it’s placement in the Korean Index. ID 404 was found in Period 2d, which was otherwise filled with strange, unrefined designs probably done by minor developer whose designs were mostly discarded. Given how none of Period 2d appeared in SW97, I don’t think it’s likely that ID 404 just happened to be Sunflora’s first form while the rest of that section were forgotten. Another crazy idea I have is that, possibly, Hanamogura (the strange second stage of Chikorita) had been repurposed by this point into a pre-evolution for Sunflora. Hanamogura is generally just a mystery regardless, but if you go back to that entry, you can read my explanation of what I think was going on there. In short, it’s possible that Hanamogura influenced Meganium’s design, but then was seen as an outlier and dropped from the evolutionary line later, because Meganium was such a good design that the first stage, Chikorita, took its cues from Meganium's design and made no attempt to build into Hanamogura. It's very likely the team already knew they’d have to rework Hanamogura into a better second stage even during the Spaceworld ’97 timeframe, and by the time of the 1999 rework, Hanamogura had already been dropped: it’s name was Mitei 01 (Pending 01) by April 1999, it's name data was completely deleted until mid-June 1999, and then finally it was renamed Bayleef. The assumption most fans have made was that the starter Bayleef got its name from Sunkern’s early name, after Sunkern was temporarily removed from the Pokedex. But what if it was the other way around? What if Hanamogura had been renamed “Bayleef” sometime in 1998, and early in the reboot it had been moved into a slot before Sunflora, eventually becoming the early Sunkern? Thus, when the developers actually came up with a new second form for Chikorita, they simply brought back the name they had already been using for the second stage and taking it from the slot Hanamogura/Sunkern was using. Admittedly, Hanamogura doesn’t look great as a Sunflora pre-evolution, but in this scenario the team probably already knew that Hanamogura would have had to be redrawn to better fit with Sunflora. When Sunkern was deleted, and then re-added to the Pokedex, Game Freak thus needed a new sprite, because Hanamogura's was already slated for rework before Sunkern had been temporarily removed. Note, also, that the Pikachu outline sprite used for Sunkern uses a dark green palette (on the question mark, most obviously). That palette would have been a perfect fit for Hanamogura if it had been updated for the Gameboy Color. The third option—and I have to stress, the most likely option—is that despite how finished Sunkern’s stats were in April 1999, the team hadn’t yet developed a sprite for it, and that it was using those placeholder Pikachu sprites since its creation. This isn’t the flashiest or most exciting answer, but it does explain why Sunkern uses a sketchy unshaded sprite when it got readded to the game in August 1999, rather than the old sprite it had previously been using. Most likely, the team had to use a sketch because they had never had a Sunkern sprite to use in the first place. Anyway, let's talk in a bit more detail about the team's ambivalence over Sunkern. Like I said above, Sunkern’s development indicates that it was on the chopping block through June and July 1999, only brought back into the games in the last couple months. Though it was almost complete by April 1999 but by July 30th, all of its stats had been deleted and replaced with placeholder 10s across the board. Then, fifteen days later, by August Sunkern had lost it’s typing and had just become Normal-type. At the same time, it stopped being able to evolve in Sunflora. By mid-August, Sunkern was completely deleted from the game. However, just seven days later, the team changed their minds. On August 22nd, Sunkern regained its typing, got new stats, and became one of the only Pokemon to use the Sun Stone to evolve. The team may have decided to bring it back a few days before this: Sunkern's sketchy prototype sprite first appears to us on August 17th, though given the gaps in our knowledge, that sprite could have been made back as early as late June, right before the decision was made to axe it. Or it could have been made quickly after August 14th, once the team decided to bring Sunkern back; it's very difficult to tell. When it did make its glorious return, the team replaced Sunkern's old stats (55 HP, 45 Attack and Defense, 65 Attack and Defense, 30 Speed) with 30s across the board, making it one of the absolute weakest Pokemon in the entire series, even to this day. Those old stats seem to have been derived from subtracting twenty points from all of Sunflora's stats at the time except Special Attack (Sunkern's was forty lower than Sunflora's). These stats were nothing special, but the new stats given new Sunkern are absurdly low. My only explanation is that when the team revived Sunkern they probably had reimagined it as a pseudo-baby Pokemon and given it the stats to match. Given that Sunkern has no arms or legs, and given that the only job of a seed it to flower, there is some sort of logic to making sure Sunkern is more or less useless before it becomes a Sunflora. So why did the team bring Sunkern back, after getting so close to deleting the seed entirely? I think there are two likely reasons. First, I think that that the team just put off replacing Sunkern with anything for so long that by August 14th, when they turned their eyes back to it, they just didn't have the time to develop a good replacement. By that point, the developers were hard at work replacing other slots that had needed fixing: Hironobu Yoshida was replacing the slot for a Shuckle evolution with Dunsparce, he was reworking Twinz into Wobbuffet, and was working on making Celebi interesting. The team was also developing Lanturn, Chinchou, Slugma, Foretress, and trying to figure out what to do with the slot previously used by a Yanma evolution. They hadn't paid much attention to the Sunkern slot for months while developing other aspects of the game, and I imagine that when they turned back to it, the team just decided that the concept of a 1st evolution for Sunflora was "good enough." The idea worked, it wouldn't take much development work to fix, and they already had a concept nearly done. They just needed to draw a sprite. Why make more work for themselves as they got closer to the release date? If it were me I would have used this slot to save Tsubomitto or Plux instead, but who knows what their thought process was there. Tsubomitto and Plux probably felt too similar to Bellossom and Scizor, hence their deletion; Sunkern, on the other hand, added some depth to Sunflora, and for that reason might have been deemed more important to the game. The second reason was suggested by a commenter on an earlier post, though I can't find the comment at the moment. This commenter speculated that Sunkern was added back into the game because the team realized that Gold and Silver only had one Pokemon that could evolve with the Sun Stone: Gloom, into Bellossom. The second Sun Stone user, Tsubomitto, had been slated for removal at almost exactly the same time that Sunkern was brought back from the dead, so Tsubomitto’s deletion could have triggered the team to bring Sunkern back to make the Sun Stone have some use. If that was the case, that explains why Sunkern’s goofy joke-sprite is so sketchy: the decision to bring back Sunkern might have been made very quickly after Tsubomitto’s deletion, and the sprite was created on the fly so they wouldn’t have to use placeholder sprites. All of this seems like a very complicated origin story for such a mediocre Pokemon. But maybe that’s exactly the point. The designers didn’t face this sort of indecision about Donphan, or Slowking, or Espeon, because those were good designs that evoke a lot of passion in players. Sunkern is a bottom barrel design, just barely good enough to justify its existence. Of course the designers would be on the fence about including it into the game. In the final game, Sunkern barely leaves an impression on players, and while Sunflora has had a lot of reappearances (even appearing in that minigame in Pokemon Scarlet), Sunkern is, to this day, pretty forgettable. Sunkern, as it turns out, didn’t have a complicated design story in spite of it’s boring design; in fact, Sunkern had a complicated origin precisely because it was so middle of the road that it barely made it to the finish line. (Fan Art by Javiera) ID X17: ShuckleWhile Shuckle existed prior to April 1999, and thus fits into Period 4a, Shuckle's journey through development is, like Sunkern's, a strange one. First appearing as more or less a generic-defensively specced Geodude lookalike, nearly everything about Shuckle was changed by the final game. So what's going on with Shuckle, the turtle/snake/bug/wine/rock Pokemon? Even in the final games, Shuckle’s a really strange Pokemon. Growing up, I was sure it was a cool turtle Pokemon, but there's nothing about Shuckle except its sprite that actually has to do with turtles, and the evidence is that the developers didn't even see the resemblance to a turtle. In fact, Shuckle is a Bug! But it's a bug-type Pokemon that...learns no Bug-type moves. It's also a Rock-type, even though it learns no Rock-type moves through level up, and only one--Rollout--through TM. Interestingly, Shuckle's Bug/Rock typing was also completely unique as of Generation II, and even in the present day, the only other Bug/Rock Pokemon are Dwebble, Crustle, and Kleavor. In the final games, Shuckle is most notorious because it is a gimmicky defensively specced Pokemon. Shuckle, of all Pokemon, has the highest Defense and Special Defense in the series, nearly maxxed out at 230. It trades those stats for some of the worst HP, Attack, Special Attack, and Speed in the entire series, making it more or less unusable except in the silliest gimmick runs. Even its moveset is odd: all Shuckle gets are Wrap and Constrict, two moves with the lowest base power in the series, and a bunch of random defensive buffs. What I'm trying to say is this: Shuckle is certainly odd. Part of the strangeness (some might call it uniqueness) of Shuckle can be traced to it’s development. Shuckle seems to have been created to fit a role almost entirely different than the one it fills in the final games. In our first view of Shuckle in April 1999, Shuckle was a Rock/Ground type. the typical typing that Rock Pokemon got in Generation I (likely because of how late the Rock type was created). Shuckle also didn’t have its strange stat spread, so it wasn’t the defensive wall it later became: instead, it had low, generic stats all around, though it’s Defense and Special defense were already it’s highest stats. Originally, Shuckle also evolved into a stronger Shuckle! We’ll talk about that more in the next entry. (Table thanks to TCRF) Quite frankly, these stats are awful. But they do seem to fit the general role that Rock/Ground Pokemon (most notably, Geodude) were used for in Generation I. It's stats probably needed a buff, or an evolution (see the next entry), but I could see this version of Shuckle as Generation II's early game defensive Rock-type; its Geodude equivalent. I’m a bit curious about what Shuckle’s moveset looked like at this early stage as well. It’s final moveset is absolutely goofy, and bad; Though, kudos to the developers, it fits Shuckle’s flavor incredibly well by stressing just how much this thing is a wall. Given that the earlier version of Shuckle was not nearly as focused, I wonder if it had a more generic Geodude-like moveset? Or, since its scrapped evolved form only ever got a placeholder Tackle as its only move, maybe that’s all that Shuckle had at that point. At the time Shuckle was Rock/Ground, its sprite was also significantly different. Compare: At first glance, this still looks like Shuckle, but there are a number of important differences. First, Shuckle is more obviously some sort of snake-like creature: you can see it slithering out of the pot it lives in. Second, of course, the rock, or whatever the final version of Shuckle lives in (the Pokedex entry calls it a shell, but I can't tell if it's part of Shuckle or something it crawls into) is a pot in these early sprites! And while the final Shuckle seems to have four legs coming out of it’s shell, in the early sprite they’re much more clearly tentacles of some sort, making Shuckle a lot stranger. I don’t think we pay enough attention to how absolutely rough this early Shuckle sprite is. If you look at it close, you’ll realize that this is a sketch, barely more polished than the infamous early Wooper sprite or the goofy Sunkern sprite, as I compared it to above. There’s almost no shading on this prototype sprite, and the perspective is basically flat. I think that if early Shuckle looked noticeably alien compared to the final design, it’d be easier to note just how much of a placeholder sketch this sprite is; since it looks close to the final design here, that makes it easier to overlook some of the sketchy details. Shigeki Morimoto created Shuckle, and I’ve always been curious about exactly what was going through Morimoto’s mind as he shaped the design. I think that part of the reason the final Shuckle's design is all over the place is because Morimoto didn't have a strong concept for a Rock/Ground Pokemon, leading the team to change its typing and eventually its stats and take it in a different direction. But I have a few possibilities for where Shuckle's origins lie. One obvious thought is that this early sprite, of a snake coming out of a pottery jar, looks a lot like the snake that a snake charmer would use: kind of like how Nameeru appears to be a snake charmer itself. Bulbapedia also suggests that Shuckle might derive from "Scale insects," which are apparently (I'd never heard of them before) insects that live under a small shell and produce honeydew to attract other insects for food. That description certainly seems to fit Shuckle. But I personally like another explanation. Though OrangeFrench strenuously disagrees with this interpretation, a lot of people think that Shuckle was originally developed from the idea of making a Pokemon out of Snake Wine. Snake Wine, a pretty exotic drink developed in Vietnam and China, is a type of alcohol in which a poisonous snake’s body is left in the container while the alcohol ferments. The theory is that the venom from the snake dissolves into the alcoholic drink, giving it a unique taste and effect on the imbiber. It’s a pretty weird inspiration for a Pokemon, but given that the early sprite of Shuckle looks like exactly the sort of pot you’d ferment wine in, the early development information we have seems to lend strength to this theory. Of course, there’s one giant flaw in the middle of this snake wine theory: why is Shuckle a Bug? If it was actually a snake, I could imagine the team making Shuckle into a Poison/Rock Pokemon, or maybe Poison/Ground, to reflect the idea that the snake in the jar is dissolving venom into the drink. Even Shuckle’s original Rock/Ground typing makes some sort of sense, if you just imagine that they’re playing up the aspects of Shuckle that have to do with earthenware clay. But Bug/Rock is a thoroughly bizarre choice for this origin story. OrangeFrench, on the other hand, has a competing theory for Shuckle’s origins that explains this Bug type. In the wild, there are a bunch of animals—notably, ants—which collect berries and other fruit and then guard them while they ferment, consuming them only after they have a level of alcohol in them. If ants are well known as an animal that does this, then Shuckle might be related to real world bugs that ferment fruits. Thus, though Shuckle may not look like it, Shuckle’s just a weird bug waiting for its berries to ferment. In early drafts, Shuckle was also known as the “pottery” Pokemon, but in the final, it became the “Fermentation” Pokemon, a title that could be evidence for either theory. There’s another oddity about Shuckle which could potentially lend credence to either. In the final game, Shuckle has a special ability no other Pokemon has. If a Shuckle is holding a berry, it has a 1/16th chance after every battle to transform that berry into berry juice. It’s a weird thing to program, and feels much more suited to Generation III, when Game Freak introduced passive abilities that each Pokemon had; in some ways, Shuckle’s ability to create berry juice feels like a prototype of that idea to give every Pokemon a unique passive trait. But this act of fermentation could prove that Shuckle is exactly the type of bug that OrangeFrench suggests, hoarding berries until they turn into "juice." It could also be the case that this juice is just a euphemism for wine, and that this proves that Shuckle is creating snake wine in its jar/shell. Shuckle's early Pokedex entry referenced the pottery it lived in, explaining that “It sneaks into jars unnoticed. Nobody knows what its true form looks like.” It’s kind of a strange entry: unlike other unknowable Pokemon like Forrestress, or Tangela, or Mimikyu, it's not like Shuckle's face or body is obscured. You can absolutely tell that Shuckle is just a weird snakey guy. Given that he isn’t really hidden, nor does he live in a jar in the final game anymore, the team changed Shuckle’s Pokedex information to something a bit more relevant. In the final, its entry focuses much more on Shuckle's relationship to berries: It stores berries in its shell. It hides motionlessly under rocks to avoid being attacked. It also mentions the most common way to find a Shuckle in the final games: using Rock Smash, a player might find this cowardly bug hiding under a boulder! Finally, there's one last important difference between early Shuckle and what it became. When first created, Shuckle was supposed to have an evolution! So let’s move on, and consider what a super-Shuckle may have been like. ID X18: Shuckle-2Yes, there was originally a giant, super-powered version of…whatever Shuckle’s supposed to be. Let’s go through what we know, which unfortunately isn’t a lot. Unfortunately, we don't have a sprite for Shuckle-2. As a result, in my head, I'm just imagining a giant kaiju Shuckle. I invite you to do the same. (Pictured above: Regular Shuckle next to its monstrous brethren) Anyway, the earliest data we have for Shuckle-2 are from April 1999, our first glimpse into the reboot period of development. In this snapshot, Shuckle-2’s stats are available: it has exactly double Shuckle’s stats in each category. This means that Shuckle-2 had pretty good defense: Shuckle had 60 in both defensive stats, which means that Shuckle-2 had 120 Defense and Special Defense. However, because of the rest of Shuckle’s early stats were terrible, Shuckle-2 was nothing to get excited about. It had 70 HP, 50 Attack, and 30 Speed, none of which was particularly good, especially for a fully evolved Pokemon. Shuckle-2 was also a Rock/Ground type, just like Shuckle-Classic, and Shuckle evolved into it at level 22. Unfortunately, Shuckle-2 had nothing but Tackle as its moveset, though I’m not sure if, at this point, Shuckle had anything more than that placeholder Tackle as well. In the case of Piloswine-3, the Scratchpads data we have left us some evidence that at least preliminary designs for a third Piloswine evolution were being worked on, but it’s very unlikely the same can be said for Shuckle-2. By June 1999, when we have our first snapshot of sprites, Shuckle-2 was using the old sprites of Berunrun, which it replaced in the Pokedex. Given that it was still using these sprites, they were probably being used as placeholders until a sprite was drawn for Shuckle-2. Since no sprite ever was drawn, those old Berurun sprites were still used until Shuckle-2 was rejected, and then they were replaced with early Dunsparce sprites. Shuckle-2 was in this slot until at least July 18th, which was three months after it first appeared, so there’s a small chance that it briefly got a sprite in July that was deleted by August 1999, when we have our next snapshot of the sprites. However, it isn't very likely that a sprite was ever made. Remember that Shuckle’s sprite as of June 1999 was incredibly sketchy, and it kept that sprite all the way until just a month or so before the final build. If the team hadn’t bothered updating Shuckle’s sprite, they probably hadn’t gotten around to making even a sketch for Shuckle-2. It's hard to stress just how sketchy Shuckle-2 was: it clearly wasn’t a Pokemon, but more or less an idea for an evolution that just never happened. A bunch of times, I’ve mentioned that Masuda’s method for designing the roster was to reserve Pokedex slots for a particular idea, and then have the designers fill in the gaps by creating a Pokemon to fill that role. Here, it seems pretty clear that Shigeki Morimoto was asked to design a two-stage Rock-type (or Rock/Ground type) Pokemon, and that the first idea he came up with was Shuckle. Given that it’s defense was its only notably good stat as it was first constructed, I’m sure part of the idea was to design an early game defensive Rock-type. However, it seems that Morimoto didn’t quite know what to do Shuckle beyond its first form. If Shuckle was designed around the goofy idea of a living snake-wine snake, then what would an evolved form of that even be like? I could imagine a world in which Shuckle’s evolution was a giant serpent, with teeth and fangs, overflowing out of a pottery jar, but Morimoto clearly seemed to think of Shuckle as something whimsical and funny, and this sort of concept just wouldn’t have worked for Shuckle. So I suspect that Morimoto left the second evolution empty until he could come up with a good idea to fit the spot. Saying that, what actually killed the idea for Shuckle-2 was the decision to make Shuckle a gimmick Pokemon based upon maxed out defense stats. It’s no coincidence that the last update to Shuckle-2 was made on July 18th, and it was transformed into Dunsparce by August 14th: after all Shuckle’s stats were changed to give it 180 Defense and Special Defense at the exact same time Shuckle-2 ceased to exist. My guess is that while Morimoto liked his little goofy pottery-snake, the team were scratching their heads about what role Shuckle could actually fill in the completed games. Once they finally figured out its role—to be a super-defensive wall—it made the idea of giving Shuckle an evolution obsolete. Sure, they could have kept the Defense and Special Defense of Shuckle at 180 and upgraded them to 230 when Shuckle evolved, but that's pretty boring: not only is the evolution not a very exciting upgrade (I guess it's more impossible to kill now?) but it also makes Shuckle less interesting, since it doesn't even have the notoriety of being the ultra defensive Pokemon anymore. Once the team had figured out Shuckle’s deal, that left the next Pokedex slot completely open. At this point, it looks like the empty slot was handed over to Hironobu Yoshida, who designed Dunsparce as a one-stage Pokemon that could fill the empty slot. I discussed how this happened in a ton of detail back when we were discussing Proto-Dunsparce, but the short version is that Yoshida—who will go on to be one of the most important Pokemon developers in later generations—seems to have been brought on to the Pokemon design team pretty late in the day and was then handed the Pokedex slots which the team needed a quick replacement Pokemon to fill. Yoshida’s three known contributions are Dunsparce—which replaced this unused Shuckle-2—Wobbuffet—which replaced Twinz after the idea for Girafarig to have a first stage fell through late in development—and Celebi—the team probably knew they wanted a mythical Mew-like Pokemon at the end of the Pokedex but no one had yet come up with a design. It seems that Masuda handed particular assignments to the other developers, such as asking Morimoto to come up with a Rock-type defensive Pokemon similar to Geodude, asking Sugimori to develop an analogue to Dragonite (Tyranitar), or asking some developer to develop an early game Normal Pokemon that could show off the idea of berries (Sentret). But in the case of Yoshida, who joined the team as most of these slots were already assigned or filled, he seems to have been given the problem assignments and just told to create whatever he wanted to fill those gaps. Like I’ve previously mentioned, it seems that Yoshida, looking for inspiration, would glance back at the discarded designs that were still in the Korean Index when deciding how to fill these slots. His early Celebi strongly resembles the discarded Kokopelli design from the Korean Index, and of course Dunsparce is strikingly close to ID #412. In this case, since Shuckle-2’s stats were replaced with Dunsparce’s final stats the second it was replaced, it seems like Yoshida got his inspiration from the Tsukinoko sprites in the Korean Index, drew up a stat spread he thought would reflect that mythical creature, and then got to work on the sprite immediately. Unlike the Piloswine evolutions, Shuckle-2 was barely a sparkle in the team’s eye before it got deleted. It had no movepool, no sprite, and barely anything distinctive about its stats. It also barely looks like the final Shuckle, having been created at a time when the team still didn’t really know how Shuckle would fit in the final games. So it’s hard for me to get too wound up about this loss. There was barely anything here, and then it was gone. (Mega Shuckle Concept, by Rollingstone51 on Reddit. Thanks for this awesome design!) ID X19: Girafarig-3It’s possible that Pokemon with the most complicated design history in Generation II was Girafarig. Despite being created at the very beginning of development, all the way back in Period 1d, Girafarig went through an incredible amount of changes. It was a Dark/Normal type, a Ghost/Normal type, and eventually a Normal/Psychic type. It's concept changed from an Giraffe with an evil twin into a Giraffe with a funny tail, and its pre-evolution went from a duo of ghosts, to a swirling Haunter-like Ghost, to a baby Giraffe, to nothing at all. Girafarig went from being a two-stage Pokemon family, to a three-stage family, back to a two-stage and eventually just a single-stage Pokemon. The design team really wanted Girafarig to have evolutionary relatives, but when those didn’t work out, they eventually went with the most boring version of the “evil ghost Giraffe” concept. Finally, 23 years later, Girafarig finally got a evolved form, in Farigiraf. Farigiraf's a recent idea, but there was a push all the way back in 1999 to give Girafarig an evolved form. We don’t know much about this Pokemon as the only data we have are some stats. Girafarig-3 got about as far as Shuckle-2 did, meaning that it was more or less a placeholder slot for a third Girafarig form more than it was an actual deleted Pokemon. Still, there are at least a few things we can say about Girafarig-3. First of all, let’s look at the stat comparisons. In April 1999 until Girafarig-3 was deleted, Twinz, Girafarig, and Girafarig-3 formed a three-stage line that followed more or less a typical spread of stat upgrades as they evolved. Girafarig added twenty points to all of Twinz’s stats, except speed (which only gained 10); Girafarig-3, in turn, added five to all of Girafarig’s stats except Special Attack and Special Defense, which both got a 15 point upgrade. Twinz was a pure Ghost-type, but Girafarig and Girafarig-3 were Ghost/Normal, on account of them both (presumably) having a regular Giraffe half and an evil Ghost half. Twinz evolved into Girafarig at level 17, and Girafarig evolved seventeen levels later, at level 34. All three of them only learned a placeholder Tackle as their only move, which probably reflected how difficult it was for the team to come up with a moveset that suited both the Ghostly, ethereal Twinz and the four-legged Giraffe-shaped Girafarig. Like I mentioned back in the Twinz entry, Twinz and Girafarig were the only Pokemon in Spaceworld ’97 not to have a full moveset, which was very odd and probably down to this difficulty. Evidently, even by the beginning of the 1999, the team hadn’t solved this problem: all they’d done was change the family to the Ghost type and added on one more member. Notice, as well, that the final Girafarig has higher stats than Girafarig-3 did across the board, and that Farigiraf's stats blow it completely out of the water. Clearly, Girafarig-3 would have gotten a boost before the end of development had it not been culled.
The Girafarig family stayed more or less exactly like this until late July; unfortunately, there’s no indication whether Girafarig-3 ever got even a basic sketch of a sprite. In the June 1999 sprite bank, Koonya’s—the discarded baby Meowth from Spaceworld ’97—sprites are being used in Girafarig-3’s slot. Koonya’s sprite has been slightly updated to fit the new Gameboy Color style shading of the reboot, suggesting that it was worked on at least a bit after Masuda rebooted development before being replaced with Girafarig-3. This, interestingly, suggests that there was some work done in early 1999 or late 1998 that we're not privy to; I would love to see a build dated from January 1999, for instance. I bet we'd see some very interesting variations on old Spaceworld '97 'mons, along with a few new concepts gone by April 1999. Koonya’s still using a Meowth-like palette by June 1999, which suggests that the team hadn’t begun to get to work on a Girafarig-3 sprite. While it’s certainly possible that in the next month the team created something, I find it pretty unlikely. Most plausibly, Girafarig-3 was never worked on to the point that the team had a reason to create a sprite, and it was deleted before anyone started doing sketches. Pineco, the eventual replacement of Girafarig-3, has the old sprites of Rinrin (the black cat) on its scratchpads, despite Rinrin probably never having inhabited this Pokedex slot. That could indicate that in July 1999, Girafarig-3 had used Rinrin’s sprites instead of Koonya’s before being deleted. This is speculative, but there’s a possibility that Girafarig-3 didn’t get a sprite because the team wasn’t absolutely sure whether Girafarig would be the final stage evolution in its three-stage line, or whether it would stay in the second spot in its evolutionary tree. As we saw in the case of Piloswine, sometimes during the reboot, multiple slots in the Pokedex were designated as part of one evolutionary line, but the designers weren’t sure exactly which order the evolutions would be in. In Piloswine’s case, Morimoto just made a sprite for all three to test out how it looked as a small, medium, or large Pokemon. In the case of Girafarig, the team could have been considering a transition Pokemon between Twinz and Girafarig, to make the evolution from one to the other feel more natural. Those two were so different and incongruous as is, so the thought may have been to make a Pokemon with traits of both. Thus, the missing Pokemon here may not have actually been Girafarig-3, which would have just been Girafarig. Maybe the one we're actually missing is the transitory stage two between a double headed ghost and an evil Giraffe. Saying that, we do know that Twinz’s slot was eventually repurposed for a baby Girafarig (which we’ll talk about in Period 2b); it’s not crazy to think that the baby Girafarig was supposed to be the missing link between the two rather than overwriting Twinz itself (though of course, in the data we have, the baby Girafarig does absolutely overwrite Twinz, but that could be a reflection of the team changing their mind). Thus, the family could have been Twinz -> Baby Giraffe -> Girafarig. Girafarig-3 only lasted as a concept until late July or early August, when it was replaced by Pineco, a completely different Pokemon that we’ll discuss in Period 4b. This is, not coincidentally, almost the exact same time that Twinz was replaced with Girafarig-1, which was also the same time that both it and Girafarig became Normal/Psychic types and dropped the Ghost-typing. There are two possibilities about what happened here. The first is just that when Twinz was updated into Girafarig-1, the team cleaned up everything surrounding Girafarig, including its unused third Pokedex slot. Under this theory, the idea of a third Girafarig evolution had been defunct since at least early July, but the team had been distracted with only priorities: when they added Girafarig-1 into the Pokedex, they simply deleted Girafarig-3’s slot as well, updating the Pokedex to their current plans. Pineco got its name by August 1st, so either the team just flat out replaced Girafarig-3 with a Pokemon the team had decided to include but was waiting for an official slot, or the Pokedex slot was briefly empty for a week or two before it was updated again to add in Pineco’s sprite. The second possibility is that the creation of Girafarig-1 was the cause of Girafarig-3 deletion: Girafarig-1 made Girafarig-3 redundant. Under this line of thinking, once the team had decided that Twinz wasn’t working, they came up with a pre-Girafarig evolution much closer to Girafarig itself. Not only would this new evolution be thematically closer to Girafarig, but it would also help make creating a moveset much easier. This, I'm sure, would be a huge help for the team because even by August, they still didn’t have a moveset for pre-Girafarig (and presumably Girafarig)! But once they had this smaller Girafarig, a third evolution may not have been necessary for the concept anymore. Maybe the team only wanted that third slot to—like I suggested above—make a bridge evolution between Twinz and Girafarig, and without Twinz, a bridge was no longer needed. Maybe the team decided that two Giraffes that looked fundamentally the same were enough, and a third evolution wouldn’t have much to build on. Who knows. It could be as simple as what happened to Shuckle-2: once the team finally realized what they wanted to do with Girafarig, they realized a third evolution wasn’t necessary for that concept. Whatever the reason, Girafarig-3 disappeared by the end of July or early August, replaced with Pineco. It never got a moveset, and as far as we can tell, never got a sprite at all. It barely lived. I can say one thing to speculate about it. Girafarig-3 was a Ghost-type, and would probably have reflected that Ghost-type more fully that Girafarig, which was only a Ghost-type because that fit Twinz better. My guess is that had the team gone forward with a Girafarig-3 concept, the goal may have been to justify its Ghost-typing more than Girafarig did, and make it spooky. Certainly, it wouldn’t have ended up looking anything like Farigiraf. We can't know what it would have looked like, but here are a few Mega-Girafarig concepts I love. Maybe you can headcanon one of them into Girafarig-3.
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AuthorMy name's Aaron George, and I'm both a historian and a fan of Pokemon, especially of development. Reach me at @Asmoranomardic Archives
February 2024
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