Pokemon fans almost got another game for Nintendo DS.
Since the project never really started to run out of the woods so far as there is no working title, the story behind its near-development status now a public knowledge tool.
Initially pulled out of the huge Nintendo leak, which was dumped online in July 2021, the mention of an in-development Pokemon Pinball title was among the listed projects listed as of 2005. The information included was limited, but DYKG couldn’t get a few details.
The unnamed Pokemon Pinball title would have been developed by Fuse Games, the team behind Metroid Prime and Mario Pinball Land, with a slated target date of September 2006, so that Pokemon Diamond and Pearls keep in the timeframe of launch. And unlike in the previous entries on Game Boy and Game Boy Advance, players would have also been able to fight with the Pokemon they captured.
DYKG interviewed a former Fuse artist Matthew Nightingale about the team’s involvement in the ill-fated DS title, revealing that the game would have followed a similar structure to Metroid Prime Pinball, in that it would have been more a adventure game than just a pinball title and add elements of core Pokemon into the traditional pinball formula.
According to Nightingale, the high quality of Metroid title likely led to representatives from The Pokemon Company and Nintendo visiting the team offices in Buford, England, after Metroid Prime Pinballs were released in October 2005. The Nintendo team had to introduce a new Pokemon Pinball title in an analogy with the teams original game for Metroid Prime Pinball.
The demo included three tabletops with focus on Sinnoh, a cityscape and a police battle.
These awesome sketches were made by @Dewndeym pic.twitter.com/RraDkbevnq.
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The Pokemon Company were very impressed by the demo we made – so far as to say the graphics were the best they’ve seen outside Japan! The company wanted to work with Fuse to develop the game, says Nightingale.
The country table would have been used as a replacement for traveling between locations and a way for the player to build up their collection of Pokemon to build divisions for battles, while the players would create units for each battle, with the exception of their Pokemon teams chosen by the players to join the team eg and go to the two sides to face off with the Gym leader. Your chosen active Pokemon would appear on your own flippers, while on the opposite side of the table you would see the Gym Leaders Pokemon between their flippers.
Type advantage would give bonuses during battles and you’d like to power up your Pokemon’s attacks with ramp shots before unleashing the entire battle. But if you lost control of the ball, the Gym-Leotor took over it and could counterattack.
The game also would have featured Wi-Fi connectivity that would have allowed players to connect and play in matches similar to those described in the Gym Leader battle.
The project was never green and Fuse closed operations in March 2009 where DYKG speculated that this partly caused an end to a new Pokemon Pinball project falling through. Even based on the date for the September 2006 target release, it is impossible to discern whether Nintendo and TPC approached Fuse for the demo from early to mid-2005 depending on the time of development and when the project was implemented upon Metroid Prime Pinball and if the project would’ve continued, it would’ve been worked on throughout 2005 and into 2006 in the hope of meeting that projection.
They can hear the full story and a hint into what features that game might have had in the DYKG video on that subject.