Pokémon Diamond & Pearl leak reveals tons of early Pokémon designs

Turns out, sometimes you do want to know how the sausage is made

A massive making-of documentary for Pokémon Diamond and Pokémon Pearl has been leaked and thoroughly studied by fans, offering all-new insights into the development of the Nintendo DS game, including never-before-seen early monster designs.

The documentary, titled Pokémon Diamond and Pearl: Behind the Scenes DVD — Make All, wasn't meant to be seen outside of developer Game Freak. It was produced internally by the creators of Pokémon, and chronicles the development of the two games. But a DVD of the doc has been acquired by fans, ripped, and uploaded to the Internet Archive.

The documentary includes plenty of early designs for Pokémon, including starters Turtwig, Piplup, and Chimchar, who once had flaming-red butt cheeks. It looks like Turtwig may have started as an armadillo-like creature before Game Freak settled on turning it into a tortoise. Based on the colors of the Piplup evolution line, it looks like Empoleon could have originally been a dual Water- and Ice-type (instead of Water- and Steel-type).

Images of a scrapped "Foam Dog" water starter, a gnome-like Delibird evolution, and an early version of Sandyghast are all shown in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl: Behind the Scenes DVD — Make All. Fans on ResetEra have been combing through the new images trying to find never-before-seen Pokémon or designs that became future monsters, like one that looks like it could have turned into Scarlet and Violet's Chien-Pao or a black woodpecker that could have morphed into Starly.

As noted by Pokémon archivist Lewtwo, there are dozens of early Pokémon Diamond and Pearl creature designs, some of which evolved into the Pokémon we know and love, some of which were later revisited for sequels, and some that were simply scrapped. Lewtwo breaks down many of the findings in the video below.

You can watch the 43-minute documentary on the YouTube channel KASHIWA 3RD, but it's entirely in Japanese. Alternatively, you can grab a copy for your personal viewing from the Internet Archive.

Archivist Lewtwo gives a great detailed overview of Make All on his own channel while the documentary plays. As Lewtwo explains, Pokémon Diamond and Pearl: Behind the Scenes DVD — Make All was largely unknown until it popped up on a Japanese auction site and was purchased by a unanimous user. Another copy was secured by Pokémon collector Neos, who worked with Lewtwo and other archivists to publically share the documentary.

You can read more about how they brought Make All to light on LewTwo.net.

Pokémon Diamond and Pearl were originally released almost 20 years ago in September 2006 in Japan (they came stateside in April 2007) for Nintendo DS. The games were remade for Nintendo Switch in 2021 as Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl.