Here at the Moonlit Vault, the Umbreon father and son team explore the topic of "what if" and mysteries surrounding Pokemon lore. 
The Pokémon That Could Have Been, Still Could Be
There has been considerable attention lately to Pokémon designs that were scrapped. I’ve seen fan art, sprites, and love galore given to the little mons that could have been.
In 1997 a demo of Pokémon Silver & Gold featured dozens of mons that didn’t make the cut into the final product. It’s presumed that they were changed or removed for in-game balancing issues. But now, over twenty years later, these little creatures are getting a lot of love, and on this page in the near future we will be looking at some of the specific designs of these lost fellas, doing some comparing and contrasting.
However, today we’ll consider could the Pokémon that could have been, still be?
The bottom line is that we always love new Pokémon. And some of these designs that were dropped are too good to not be official. So down the line in future Gens, why not see some of them finally get their day in the sun?
We’ve done something close already; one of the proposed but dropped Pokémon was a Farfetch’d evo Madaamu.
Now while Sirfetch’d is quite different from the scrapped Madaamu, the idea of a Farfetch’d evo finally was realized. So most certainly, there’s room to see some of these have their time in the sun. A hugely popular mon is the Kotora evolution line. The adorable electric tigers would definitely be a well received new edition. Gen 9 perhaps?
One idea that seems like a no-brainer is to have regional variants for the previously scrapped designs. To make that clear, some Pokémon were not dropped, it was just their designs that changed. For instance, some Pokémon like Pichu obviously still made it in, albeit with a completely different design.
So to me, if we can have Weezing that are overtly British smokestacks & chubby Garfield Persian, then we definitely can have small round Pichu or lion-like Porygon2 that you can only find in some far flung region.
We live in a time where two things are very popular; remake nostalgia & being very meta. So imagine a what if sort of situation if they remade Gold and Silver specifically with all of these original demo versions instead of/in addition to what we ended up getting.
I think people would be all over this, it’s extremely doable. Because there are dozens of unused designs here (not to mention the actual differences in the region itself) that would warrant an entire game. Hey, let’s get our “Let’s Go Marill” & “Let’s Go Togepi!”
I can’t see much being done with these if they weren’t actually put in a game in one of the aforementioned ways. But nevertheless one can dream, can’t one?
A special range of Pokémon card game cards with these lost beauties would be far more reasonable and less expensive to make than coding a whole game.
Even something like plushies would totally be welcomed by the fandom with these adorable, huggable little fellas.
At the very, very least, how about a published dex of unused Pokémon designs.
There are a ton from this 97 Gold/Silver demo, but can you imagine all of the other scrapped designs over the years? Just a book on the history, one gen at a time, would be a magnet for Pokémon fans. Documented proof of what could have been.
So how would you like to see these lost, vaulted Pokémon see the light of day?
