Rumour: Pokémon Yellow Datamine Unearths Potentially Scrapped Pokémon Pink Version

They probably had some plans to make a more girl focused version but scrapped them due to the audience being mostly boys at the time.

Jigglypuff appearing as a fighter in Smash 64 makes more sense now!

I had a feeling the moon was cut content in pokemon r/b/g/y

@AlexanderDaniels Jigglypuff was put in because it was similar to Kirby, so they could reuse an existing model and animations, rather than make a new one from scratch.

@RupeeClock Funny that all these years later it was Eevee that replaced Clefairy as Pikachu’s co-mascot.

Even the anime was originally considering Clefairy to be Ash's starter of choice (err… make that lack there of). The anime would have taken some inspiration from the gag-manga.

This certainly is an interesting what if

@SmaggTheSmug Eevee is the Rival's starter in Yellow and as Let's Go is a remake of Yellow it made sense the other one would be Eevee.

@Octane Actually, Jigglypuff only shares a VERY small amount of animations with Kirby in 64. The similar bodies were a convenience, but not the main driving force of Puff's inclusion.

There are some interesting cases for Clefairy in the comments that I didn't know of or think about. Jigglypuff would make a little more sense to me from an anime perspective as it's a recurring character in the earlier seasons.

Oh well, guess we'll never truly know. It's interesting and fun to think about what could have been.

@Sandro89 congratulations on writing the dumbest thing on the internet today.

@frogopus you smoked him for all of us

@RupeeClock While I would like your prediction to be true from a fan standpoint, it seems that Jigglypuff is the far likelier candidate, for a few reasons: Jigglypuff was in a prominent guest role in the anime and had a lot of merchandise released internationally and cameo appearances in non-Pokémon media (at least compared to Clefairy), and had a unique and focused personality. Clefairy, while originally planned to be the first starter and series mascot, didn't appear in the anime in any prominent role outside of the typical "one episode per one of the 150" original format." The anime is key, I think, because that was marketed towards a general audience and the subsequent merchandise and cameo appearances seem to support this (and also, of course, because Yellow was intended to incorporate a lot of the anime's unique elements, so it seems rational to expect Pink to follow the same formula). The manga had already been marked as wholly a different canon than the anime's and a different target audience (and, possibly, age group) since before the anime, largely due to the manga author's distinct usage and vision of (especially) Clefairy. More information is needed, true, but either way is very cool.

@frogopus While I think you're very right that Pokémon (the game series) was likely designed largely for children, and was seemingly originally conceived to cater towards a more equal male-to-female audience, the fact that only one gender for the player appears in the game until Crystal seems to indicate that the game series was initially marketed to a predominantly young boy audience (even though the game features female trainers and even though the original commercial for the game series prominently featured a female player: Tomboys were big thing back then, and they didn't mind playing "boys games/toys", which might possibly explain why you saw/knew a lot of girls playing it at the time while I definitely did not (and was instead teased by girls for liking it)). The anime (and probably initially the manga, also) is a wholly different story, as girls in the 90s were expected to just as likely watch TV/films as much as boys were, but definitely were not as expected to play video games as boys were, then. Pikachu was definitely made the star of the anime (and eventual mascot of the whole metaseries because of that) because of wanting to attract female audiences (which was much more difficult to do at the time with video games, especially ones with "monsters"/"gross-out" visuals in them).

The MLP comparison is a bit anachronistic, too, because My Little Pony was not at all popular with a male audience until My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic launched a little over a decade ago.

Interesting thoughts, regardless.

My money would have been on Jigglypuff being the Pink representative as some have pointed out, it was and remains probably one of the most identifiable Pokémon from the anime and outside apart from Pikachu and Eevee

@frogopus I think there has been some challenge in various games throughout the series (especially in comparison to where we are now with Sword and Shield). I won't say Dark Souls level of challenging. But I remember having moments during the 5th Gen and even the Colosseum games (to step a little outside the main series) that forced me to really be strategic in how I approached battles.

The starter would no doubt have been Clefairy, if you know you're stuff about REALLY early Pokémon stuff.

Very interesting. Especially now when Eevee has well been established as the alternate choice to Pikachu. I suppose Pokemon Brown wouldn't have been that appealing of a color choice.

It's a great find, this is amazing to look through.
Can't understand the code, but the comments seem very real, written in a mush of English and Japanese.
There's even multiple different revisions of Blue's English translation in there, the stones were apparently food at one point in time (Fire Kimchi?!), and more.

There don't seem to be many references to a pink version, so I don't know how far it was legitimately considered, but there's at least three files with a comment about it.

There's enough stuff that it's very unlikely to be fabricated, though obviously I can't say for sure every single line and comment is authentic.

Hacking done right.

it may or may not have been a good idea for pokemon pink. it could attract more girls to play during pokemon's early days/prime or it would not sell as much due to only boys playing so they would get yellow instead

I'm more of a Jigglypuff fan than I am a Clefairy fan. Pokemon Pink sounds legit.

@xshinox What is this thing about girls not playing Pokemon? I don't remember a boys only label on the game boxes.

@Trikeboy outdated sexist assumptions

@duffmmann That's a really interesting point. Maybe your Rival would have Eevee in either version, or perhaps they initially envisioned Rival to have the opposite version's starter but they thought it would be strange for tough guy "Gary" to have a Jigglypuff, perhaps also influencing the scrapping of Pink altogether. Or perhaps they planned on having a female Rival/Player(option) but that didn't test well or was too overbearing of a programming task for Game Freak, so they didn't continue to pursue it and focused more on reflecting only on the perspective of "Satoshi/Ash" just as the anime does.

Something else that may have influenced the scrapping of Pink: because Pikachu was made the series mascot of the anime, this scrapping may have taken place very early in development/planning, seeming costly and excessive to make two new versions when one of the proposed new versions already had a character that appealed to both boys and girls.