Nintendo recently announced two new Pokémon games coming to Switch later this year and one that’s out now called Pokémon Quest. There’s also a bigger Pokémon RPG coming in 2019. The real news this week though is that there actually used to be a ton of weird and adorable Pokémon that were planned for Pokémon Gold and Silver which never made it into the final games, and if there’s one thing the Internet loves more than new Pokémon its super-pixelated old ones.
A ROM of a 1997 demo for what would become Pokémon Gold and Silver just got into the hands of the public after two decades. Included in it, among other things, were sprites for Pokémon that never ended up getting to see the light of day. Until now. Some of these “beta” Pokémon are super cute, others are tragically monstrous, almost all of them are baby forms of already beloved creatures like Meowth and Tangela though and so people are understandably jacked that they exist.