Pop Culture Urban Legends / Pokémon

Not to be confused with Urban Legends of Zelda. This page is for non-gameplay related rumors. Any gameplay related rumors should go on the other page.

• Creepypasta-related rumors:
  • Lavender Town Syndrome: This was an urban legend about suicides in the nineties in Japan after kids played the original Red and Green versions and were driven insane by the song that plays in Lavender Town. A lesser version claims that there are higher-pitched tones that cause subtle discomfort and only children can fully hear them, that were changed in the localized Red and Blue. While the song is certainly creepy, if there is any Brown Note, it's in all four versions — all the music is bit-for-bit identical in all four of Red and Green, Japanese Blue, Red and Blue, and Yellow. And while there are indeed high-pitched ringing tones, they are around 14kHZ, which can be heard up to age 45 on average, making the "only children can fully hear them" part mostly false and the only symptom actually reported was headache (which could have also been due to eyestrain from playing too long).
  • "BURIEDALIVE": A zombie trainer and boss fight that supposedly existed at the top of the Pokémon Tower, which would attack you if you examined the gravestone behind where Mr. Fuji stands during the story. BURIEDALIVE was stronger than the Champion, and would battle with several "WHITEHAND"s (a reference to a line from an NPC in Lavender Town, who would mention a "white hand" on the player's shoulder). If you managed to beat BURIEDALIVE, the game would crash, while if you lost, BURIEDALIVE would say "Finally, fresh meat!", and the game would then cut to a Game Over screen of it eating the Player Character; the game would then overwrite your Game Boy's startup screen with this image, ensuring you would be reminded of your failure whenever you turned the system on. In addition to the content being way too dark for a game marketed to children, extensive datamining has shown nothing relating to the fight, its similarly "unused" WHITEHAND cohorts, or anything related to a Game Over screen at all, let alone the one from the tale. On top of that, the story features several elements that are flat-out impossible for the Game Boy (repeatedly mentioning GIF and WAV files and "meshes" allegedly datamined from the game; the Game Boy has no filesystem, and can't natively make use of any of those data formats), and the console's bootup screen is stored in ROM, which is impossible to overwrite.
  • Pokémon Black (often renamed to "Creepy Black" to avoid confusion with the later-released Pokémon Black and White) was a rumored bootleg cartridge or romhack of Pokémon Red and Blue. In it, your starter Pokémon is one of the Lavender Tower ghosts, which can never be switched out of your party, which no opponents can attack, and whose only move, "Curse", is almost always a One-Hit KO^note While a genuine move named "CURSE" exists in the franchise, it was only added in Pokémon Gold and Silver onwards. If you fight a trainer, each curse causes the ball containing your opponent's 'mon to disappear from the roster. When your opponent has no Pokémon left, you can now curse them directly; doing so causes them to turn into an Instant Gravestone. When you beat the Elite Four, you get a Flash Forward to yourself as an old man, where you see a vision of every mon and trainer you cursed as you slowly make your way from Lavender Town back to Pallet Town, where your ghost turns on you and subjects you to a Hopeless Boss Fight. When your HP hits zero, it curses you; the screen turns black and will not change. If you reset the game, your save file will be erased - or in some versions, your Game Boy will be bricked entirely. While Black was eventually given a full defictionalization courtesy of a dedicated fan, the initial story was... well, just that.
• It's very commonly claimed that Satoru Iwata saved the development of Pokémon Gold and Silver by writing a new compression algorithm that was so efficient it allowed the developers to include the Kanto map from the previous game as a bonus. This is not quite right: while Iwata did write the compression algorithm for the game, an in-depth technical analysis shows that it actually takes up more space than Red & Blue's, the main gain being in speed (for loading in and out of battles and such) rather than efficiency. Furthermore, Gold & Silver used a cartridge that had twice the capacity of Red & Blue (and four times the capacity of the original Japanese release) and had plenty of unused data that could've been cut if space was an issue.
• The remakes of Pokémon Gold and Silver have an extremely-persistent-even-after-debunked rumor that Youngster Joey's "top-percentage" Rattata is set to have perfect Individual Values. Trainer Pokémon weren't even capable of having defined IVs until the 3DS games.
• A 2005 April Fool's prank started a rumor of a remake of Hey You, Pikachu! for the Nintendo DS that introduced a new Pokémon called "Korechu". A tech demo similar to Hey You, Pikachu! was shown off in 2004, but no proof that it was intended to be made into a full game has ever surfaced.
• There is an urban legend that the Shadow Triad were originally meant to be revealed as the Striaton Trio in Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 but this was changed in development. This stems from a theory that originated from the triplets being absent during the climax of Black & White and was egged on by the Adventures manga (which later revealed the similarities to be a Red Herring). Even after the sequel games confirmed that they're not the same characters, concept art depicting the Shadow Triad's original BW2 designs has led to this idea being circulated amongst the fandom. Either way, it's never been confirmed to be more than speculation.
• Shortly after the announcement of Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire, someone noticed Nintendo registered a trademark for Delta Emerald, sparking rumors that a remake of Emerald version was coming; however, the trademark is simply for "Delta Emerald", not "Pokémon Delta Emerald", suggesting it wasn't intended for the title of a fully independent game, and might've just been an early name for what became the Delta Episode included in the base games.
  • Nintendo regularly files blanket trademarks for multiple titles at once, most of which end up going unused; Bulbapedia has a list of all known unused trademarks. One that particularly caught the interest of fans was "Pokémon White Gold", filed around the same time as Emerald's release, leading fans to believe that a GBA remake of Gold and Silver was in the works; remakes of them wouldn't surface until the DS era a few years later. In addition, multiple color-themed names were registered shortly after the release of Pokémon Black and White, including the rumored "Gray", but also including "Brown", "Purple", "Vermillion", "Crimson", "Scarlet", and "Yellow"; ultimately, none of these would be chosen as an Updated Re Release was scrapped in favor of direct sequels to Black and White.
• After the release of Pokémon Sword and Shield, a slew of alleged screenshots from a new update of Pokémon Masters featuring multiple references to the new games appeared, such as Iris stating that the Galar champion Leon is her cousin and Blue complaining about his Pidgeot not being allowed to go in the Galar region. Such screenshots are all fabrications.
• Some fans have speculated that Butterfree was originally designed to be the evolved form of Venonat, stemming from how similar the two Pokémon look. Despite how popular the rumor is, it's never been confirmed and leaks of beta elements from Pokémon Red and Blue show no hints that this was ever the case. People to have analyzed the development further believe that Venonat and Venomoth were indeed designed separately, but Caterpie, Metapod, and Butterfree appear to have been created at the same time and added as a group.
  • A less famous but still persistent is a rumor that Gyarados and Dragonite were similarly swapped - pointing to Gyarados's blue serpentine design and Dragonite's orange body and antennae. This one has a grain of truth to it; source code leaks suggest that Dragonite was designed separately from Dratini and Dragonair, and only added to its evolutionary family later^note something that wasn't uncommon during Red and Green's development; for example, the Squirtle and Blastoise lines were once completely unrelated, but they ended up being combined when having two Water-type turtle families was deemed redundant, but no evidence suggests Gyarados was ever connected to Dratini, instead being a very early design that was given a goofily wimpy pre-evolution later on in development.
• In Pokémon Sword and Shield, because of this meme, some people believe that a Poké Kid in the Battle Tower hints that his mother is drugging him with cocaine. The screenshot is fake, with the text not even matching the game's normal font. Notably, on the Reddit post with this fake screenshot, the few people who point out that it's fake are largely ignored. The rumor likely remained strong because the series is no stranger to tossing a few racy jokes; one such joke that actually is in Sword and Shield has a Poké Kid innocently implying her mother is a◊ Dominatrix.
• Many people have claimed that the creator of Pokemon is autistic. There is no credible source proving that Satoshi Tajiri has autism. This video discusses the rumor's origins and debunks it.
• One factoid commonly shared among the Pokémon fandom is that Snorlax is directly inspired by Game Freak employee Kōji Nishino, and that its Japanese name (Kabigon) is a nickname given to Nishino and derived from 黴 kabi (mold), since Nishino reportedly had a habit of eating moldy food. While the first part of the factoid is confirmed by Game Freak staff, the second part about Nishino eating moldy food is just a myth. Instead, according to a 2019 interview by Game Informer, Junichi Masuda stated that Kabigon is a pun on Kirby (Japanese: カービィ Kābī), and that Nishino was nicknamed "Kirby" by the other Game Freak staff thanks to his large appetite. Further evidence is this piece of concept art◊ which resembles Kirby, Nishino, and Snorlax all at once. This rumor might have started because of multiple Pokédex entries mentioning Snorlax's tendency to eat moldy food, with the Japan-only supplementary book The Pokédex directly stating that Kabigon got its name from that habit, but this is possibly to avoid breaking immersion by directly referencing Kirby.