Pokemon Red / Blue (Capsule Monsters) [GB – Beta / Concept]

Pokemon Red / Blue (Capsule Monsters) [GB – Beta / Concept]

Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue (Pokèmon Green in Japan) are the first installments of the Pocket Monsters series of RPG developed by Game Freak and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy 1996. The Pokemon project originally started in 1990 and was internally know as “Capsule Monsters”, as found out by Celebi23 in his researches on the development of the saga.

The name “Capsule Monsters” is inspired by Japanese gashapon machines. Apparently, Tajiri had trouble trademarking the name “Capsule Monsters” so he changed it first to “CapuMon” and then later “Pocket Monsters”.

It looks like development started in the Fall of 1990 & was scheduled to be released in December of 1991. From what I can tell, there was not enough funds to continue development so, “Capsule Monsters” was put on hold in early 1992. About 80% of the music was already finished. They then developed “Yoshi” for the NES & the GameBoy.

The surprising success of that game helped to give GameFreak the resources that it needed. In 1993, it was put to an internal vote as to whether Game Freak should complete the Pokémon games (then still called Capsule Monsters). 80% were for finishing development. In the summer of 1994, “Pocket Monsters” resumed development. While development has started once more, numerous interruptions (all money related) kept popping up. And as such, they developed many other games while still working on Red/Green.

You can find more info on Celebi23’s researches on his website!

Tajiri was also influenced by Square’s Game Boy game The Final Fantasy Legend, noting in an interview that the game gave him the idea that more than just action games could be developed for the handheld.

Images:

In Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow it’s possible to discover a mysterious truck in the north-east of the Anne S.s. ship anchored at the port of  Vermillion City. This van is technically unattainable, located at a point of the game where it is visited only through GameShark or external programs.

In reality however there is a way for reaching it with an in-game glitch, that is to lose a fight (and so do a “game over”) and then Start over to another location. That truck was probably designed for some reason, but ultimately was not used in the final game.

The van is present in the original Gameboy version and also in Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen for the Game Boy Advance. Since it is still unused and unreachable (this time it cant be reached without a GameShark) is thought to be a reference and homage to the original one.

Thanks to Enricothedark for the contribution!

What exactly is MissingNo?

Missingno. is the Glitch Pokémon that appears after viewing the Old Man’s tutorial in Viridian City on how to catch Pokémon, then immediately Flying to Cinnabar Island and Surfing along the right hand side of the island until one is encountered, without visiting any other areas.

Whenever the game “sets up” the planned battle against the Old Man’s Weedle, it needs to change the player’s character name to “OLD MAN” so that it will display “OLD MAN” instead of the name the player has entered.

The programmers decided to use the area of data where wild Pokémon information is as a temporary storage area for the player’s name, due to the lack of memory on a Game Boy. Normally this wouldn’t cause any abnormal activity, as the correct data for the wild Pokémon available is written to this area in memory whenever the player travels to an area where it is possible to catch wild Pokémon, such as walking in tall grass or using a fishing rod.

Along Cinnabar Island’s coast, however, there is no data indicating which wild Pokémon are catchable, and the same is true for both Viridian City and Cinnabar Island itself, at least by movement in long grass. The game uses whatever data was already in the corresponding area of data when determining which wild Pokémon encountered and their levels—now the player’s name. Normally this space in memory would hold the data of the last area visited where wild Pokémon were catchable in grass and their level data (this same glitch allows players to exit the Safari Zone and Fly immediately to Cinnabar Island to be able to catch and fight Safari Zone Pokémon in the same way as they would in other areas, as Fuchsia City also has no wild Pokémon data for long grass), however, since in both Viridian City and Cinnabar Island the data is empty for Pokémon obtainable in the grass, the active data is never overwritten, leading to Missingno.’s. availability, among other things.

The name of the player has six hexadecimal values in it. The game needs only three “slots” of wild Pokémon data to store this.

The wild Pokémon the player encounters along the coast are determined by the third, fifth, and seventh characters of the player’s name, while the levels are determined by the second, fourth, and sixth characters, respectively. By knowing which letters and symbols match which species and levels, through use of certain calculators and charts, it is possible to set the player name at the start of the game so as to find specific Pokémon at specific levels.

Also, Coolboyman found a beta song in Pokemon Red! You can listen to it in the video below

Videos:


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9 thoughts on “Pokemon Red / Blue (Capsule Monsters) [GB – Beta / Concept]

  1. Neo

    Missingno.. I remember Missing Number well, and the creators knew of this. It’s just someone messed up with Cinnabar, so Missingno. was placed in by accident. (The OLD MAN theory is also true, about him changing the player’s name into Wild Pokemon until you enter an area that has pokemon but reverts your name back to normal, which the right-side areas DO NOT)

    Missingno. was supposed to be the PRE-EVOLUTION of Kangaskhan and the evolution of Marowak, I’m sure of it. It was then removed and changed to #0, Marowak got Cubone, Kangaskhan became by iteself, and the creators did translate Missingno. (noting that Missingno. is also in the japanese version, and it means the exact same thing)

  2. caleb

    Interesting thing to bring up! Is if you ever try to level up Missingno it will evolve into a Kangaskahn, which leads me to believe that Baby Kangaskahn was at one point planned to be a separate pokemon in the game that would evolve in a Kangaskahn.

  3. Claire

    On a note about the evolution to Kangaskahn, I read (probably on bulbapedia, not sure) that the reason the pre-evolution was axed was in favor of the story about the Cubone and Marawak in Pokemon Tower. It was something about the baby kanga putting it’s dead mother’s skull on its head, making it a Cubone, and making the three of them an evolution set, and Pokemon Tower’s story was supposed to explain it, but for whatever reason (the major plot hole maybe?), it was scrapped and the data for the unused baby was written into slot 0 on the pokedex just in case later in production they decided to use it again. I need to find where I read that…

  4. Champion Olivier

    MissingNo. also have the beta type Bird. Wich became the Flying type later. So, it kinda kills the Baby Kangaskhan theory as MissingNo. is a BIRD/Normal-type Pokémon. Also, Cubone and Marowak are of the Ground-type, unlike Kangaskhan that is of the Normal-type.

  5. Alkaid

    To the one who asked above about what Missingno does, it causes errors in your Hall of Fame data (if you have it) by causing glitched entries with garbled descriptions and pokemon featured that you more than likely didn’t have in the original entry, although it’s still viewable without too much worry of crashing. Some missingno types can crash the game if it was sent to the box and you try to withdraw it, but others may not only allow you to withdraw it without problem, but may also turn your other pokemon in that same box into missingnos as well. In the party, certain missingnos will mimic the stats of either the pokemon immediately close to it or the pokemon you’ve last seen (or in some cases, retain a set amount of stats), and would cause a few errors in-battle such as backwards or garbled sprites for both your and your opponent’s sprites, bits of garbage data on the screen (commonly letters or numbers), an unreliable health bar that can fluctuate throughout the battle, garbled sound or music, and more. What effects and how commonly they will appear, again, depends on the kind of missingno you have, as well as the dangers they pose. For instance, the “standard” missingnos (the ones that appear as either the unidentified ghost or the skeletons of Aerodactyl or Kabutops) are relatively safe and cause the aforementioned visuals, but otherwise are relatively “safe” if handled with care (as in taking precautions such as finding a way to view pokemon that match its hex codes and thus “already own” the missingno in question to avoid seeing its pokedex. This is a common rule of thumb since any missingno poses a huge threat of crashing among other things if you look at their pokedex entry). M block is less safer and risks multiple crashes or data corruption, and .44444 is more than likely to break your game than not if so much as encountered and allowed to attack. In addition, glitch moves also play a role in determining if a glitch is “safe” or “unsafe” to use (such as .44444 having a move commonly dubbed as “Superglitch” which is part of the reason why it’s so dangerous). I find this lets play of Pokemon Blue to be very helpful in regards to the different kinds of Missingnos and glitches out there, if you’d like to take a look.

    http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/BreakingBlue/index.html

    Missingno is not a singular pokemon species, but an umbrella term referring to multiple empty slots caused by the gameboy’s cartridge memory being able to store data on more pokemon than there actually were. That way it’s not so much we have one missingno so much as 105 of them (the game supports hex codes for up to 256 critters. The game used 151.) . It was not intended as any specific series and the fact it evolves into particular pokemon (Rydon or Kangaskahn in particular) is because of the hex codes. Rydon is especially common because its hex code is among the first in the line of all other pokemon, and is believed to be the first pokemon coded in the game (although whether it is the first pokemon created is a whole other story). The theory of Cubone/Marowak being a pre-evolution of Kangaskahn I find kind of interesting, though. It reminds me a lot of another theory I’ve heard of how Butterfree and Venomoth may have accidentally switched places before production (due to the former sharing similarities to Venonat and the latter with Metapod), although I’m not fully convinced Missingno (as a species) is part of the evolution.

    Oh, and I heard the other method to seeing the truck without hacking (in addition to the one above) is also to purposely lose a trainer battle on the ship. You’ll be taken to the pokemon center, and when you return to the docks, the S.S.Anne will still be there. This would supposedly allow you to take Cut from the captain without causing the ship to leave, allowing you to keep the ship there and access the truck later when you get Surf. ;) No mews hiding there, though, but there is indeed a lava cookie (in FireRed and LeafGreen).

  6. Lost In the Wind

    The losing a trainer battle doesnt work in FR/LG or so i herd. When you loose a battle in FR/LG it takes you directly back to the ship I think.

  7. Divina Reiten

    There is noticeably a bundle to realize about this. I suppose you made various good points in features also.

  8. kokirian

    you can get to the truck! if you move in front of the guy that says the ship sailed, move right, hold it and pause to save. restart, use surf , and you should go down!

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