The recent Nintendo leak that we covered a few weeks back was a pretty wild event in the gaming world as Nintendo usually keeps a tight lid on their development process and on all the features and games that got the axe over the years.
But as the internet continues to dig through the leak we are discovering some pretty wild ideas that Nintendo had in mind -one of the biggest involving the venerable Pokemon series.
Pokemon has always been a tentpole series that Nintendo almost always plays it safe with. You only have to take a look at the latest core entry into the series on the Nintendo Switch to see how little the core game has evolved.
And aside from the odd and truly weird side game (Pokemon Conquest anyone) the series is pretty set in its ways. But back in 2005 at the tail end of the life-cycle of the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo has one last plan to keep the console going, especially since the Nintendo DS was an unproven and many thought it would fail out of the gate.
Nintendo has a backup plan, and that plan was a Pokemon MMO for the Game Boy Advance. This would be something far ahead of its time as well as something unheard of in 2005. An MMO on a handheld wasn’t even seen as a possibility to anyone, outside of Nintendo we know know.
The game itself didn’t get a name but was going to be based on Pokemon Fire Red and Leaf Green, themselves remakes of the first generation of Pokemon games. The project was in development at the Chinese studio iQue, a studio bearing the name of the Nintendo 64 console that released in China that was Nintendo’s first foray into the digital only storefront.
The game was going to borrow its online elements from Pokemon Coliseum and let players connect to the internet by offloading data onto a PC to play. It sounds like a complicated system for 2005 and with the unimaginable success of the Nintendo DS it only made sense to pull the plug on the game.
What’s interesting to note is that Nintendo pretty much abandoned the idea of a Pokemon MMO and never looked back. We are only recently starting to see the idea of Pokemon-inspired game becoming an MMO with the likes of TemTem over on Steam.
To be honest, now would be the perfect time for a Pokemon MMO as Niantic has made a fortune with Pokemon GO and with consoles now featuring robust online systems. Imagine Nintendo announcing a Pokemon MMO for Switch just as the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft release. It sure would have for an interesting 2021.
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