Pokemon Go has had Mega Evolutions for years now and has since moved on to adding Gigantamax Pokemon as recently as October, but way back before the Mega Evolutions were implemented, they looked a bit different in Pokemon Go. According to some documents that leaked online as a result of the massive Game Freak hack, the Mega Energy was originally called something completely different that would’ve had it more in line with items Pokemon go players would be familiar with from the mainline games.
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In Pokemon Go, the Mega Evolution system is governed by a resource called Mega Energy which players have to collect in order to Mega Evolve their Pokemon like Charizard, Venusaur, Blastoise, Gengar, and more. The Mega Evolution state these Pokemon adopt is only a temporary one similar to how the system works in the main games, but the Mega Energy is unique to Pokemon Go since all the main Pokemon games basically required was the specific Mega Stone for each Pokemon you wanted to Mega Evolve.
But according to these new Pokemon Go leaks, Mega Stones were at one point planned for the mobile Pokemon game. A Redditor shared the document below this week that seems to depict early versions of the Pokemon Go Mega Evolution system wherein a translated version of the image shows that “Mega Stone Fragments” were used to work towards full Mega Stones. Players could obtain these Mega Stone Fragments by participating in Mega Raids against Mega Evolution Pokemon with more Mega Stone Fragments earned depending on how hard the raid was. A Mega Beedril, for example, earned Pokemon Go players fewer fragments than fighting a Mega Tyranitar.
This concept is essentially the same as the Mega Energy mechanic that we have now in Pokemon Go albeit with some interesting (and largely inconsequential) differences. For one, the document shows that players earn around 100 Mega Stone Fragments max from the hardest raid, but Pokemon Go‘s current Mega Raids can net players much more Mega Energy than that. The documents do show that the Mega Stone Fragment name was always a temporary one, and it’s not too surprising to see why it was changed.
While Pokemon Go has always used its own mechanics since not everything from the main Pokemon games would translate to Pokemon Go, Mega Stone Fragments were probably decided against since there’s no fragment system in the main Pokemon series. Instead of having to justify why nobody ever talked about Mega Stone Fragments in the main games despite Mega Stones already existing, Niantic, Game Freak, and The Pokemon Company probably just decided it was easier to rename the mechanic overall.
When the document above was shared, Pokemon Go players quickly picked up on something else interesting: a blue Charizard X that notably had an Electric type. While it’s an interesting idea, the most likely reasoning behind this showing up is that the Mega Charizard asset simply wasn’t ready for these documents yet, so we got a blue Charizard instead. That said, probably best not to get your hopes up for a blue Charizard to be added to the game in the future.
Other Mega Evolution leaks from the same Pokemon incident revealed that we really got the better version of Mega Gengar compared to what Game Freak and The Pokemon Company were cooking up initially. There was also going to be a Mega Jynx at one point which, based on what it looked like, thankfully didn’t happen.
