Sometimes, something happens that’s so huge, so massive, and so legendary that it will be talked about for years to come. Last Friday, the data from an immense GameFreak leak went live, giving fans the world over insights as to the internal creative decisions of GameFreak, the makers of Pokémon, the highest-grossing intellectual property in human history.

This post won’t go over each of the details of the leak, which is a developing story, with fans still combing over the gigabytes of information. This post is more about the implications of the leak.

For one thing, the leak is acknowledged by GameFreak as containing personally-identifiable information on a number of their thousands of employees. In saying so, GameFreak has indicated that the leak is authentic.

But it also adds to the potential legal consequences that could be faced by the hacker(s), which Nintendo is likely to hunt down like a shiny Pokémon.

To briefly touch on what the leaks contain, included are, among other things, documents involving the creative direction of the gens 3, 4, and 5 games, many images of Pokémon that were redesigned before release, many Pokémon that were never released, possibly-scrapped plans for a sequel to the Detective Pikachu movie, and some amount of data for upcoming Pokémon games, including Pokémon Legends Z-A and the 10th generation of Pokémon.

And there’s more, such as the internal name for the Nintendo Switch successor, which was referred to as “Ounce”.

Without question, as far as hacks go, this is comparable to the “gigaleak” of Nintendo data a few years ago. But this one is different, as it specifically concerns Pokémon. Again, Pokémon is the highest grossing intellectual property in human history, and it has a fan base in the tens of millions, possibly many more. In the gaming world, the impact of this leak is seismic.

Also among the documents are those concerning the creative direction of the anime, such as concept drawings for the characters, and the reasoning behind the choice to conclude the story of Satoshi/Ash, and take the anime in a new direction.

Personally, I would’ve liked to see Gorochu. But maybe that’s in there, somewhere. Still, having seen the creative decisions being considered for it, I kinda wanna play the Sapphire version, again.

But as for the content concerning future Pokémon games, it’s not a bad idea to consider that things are subject to change. And perhaps GameFreak will gain a desire to change them, now that certain elements that they intended to be a surprise have gotten out there. But considering that the leak has shown us elements of past games that did change, it’s reasonable to expect that unreleased games will be subject to change prior to release.

Also, this leak is massive for the modding community, as it contains full beta versions of games from the DS era, and it sounds like it contains editors for at least one of the GBA games. Beta versions and developer tools are kinda a big deal.

There are also some creative elements that were probably better to leave out of the final products, such as a story about a woman with an injured foot who was attacked by a Vigoroth. That goes to show that the creators of Pokémon considered a lot, including stuff that wouldn’t have fit the tone of the games well.

Out of the unreleased designs, my favorite would be the unreleased Hoenn starter, Warabito (apparently Warabbit, a portmanteau of “water” and “rabbit”). While Mudkip may have fit in more with the other two, I’d have probably picked Warabbit, if that was an option.

There’s likely to be more to the leak to be discovered, as fans are still picking through them. It’ll be interesting to see what they find.