Did Pokemon Almost Have a WarioWare-Style Title?

As we reported last week, Game Freak had a massive hack that slowly leaked online, dropping all sorts of files and insights into what was going on with the company game-wise, as well as the various ideas they had about the Pokemon franchise. To be clear, some of those leaks were either mistranslated or weren’t entirely true, which is why we’ve chosen to talk only about certain ones since the leaks started happening. However, a new leak dropped today with actual video footage of a canceled title, codename “Project Swallow,” and it doesn’t take a genius to see that it was modeled off the WarioWare franchise.

As you can see via the set of videos below, this game would’ve featured players doing all kinds of mini-games, or “micro-games,” as they are called with Wario’s franchise, and they have just seconds to complete certain tasks to gain success. The title itself was apparently to be made for mobile systems, and that makes sense given that both Game Freak and The Pokemon Company have used the mobile market fairly well ever since unleashing a certain title that made fans get up and GO, if you get our drift.

Check out the videos below and see what you make of them:

Sadly, and obviously, the project was canceled, and it’s a bit hard to say why. The leak didn’t offer any insight into it, and it’s not hard to think that people would’ve at least given it a try. After all, Wario’s series had multiple games on the Nintendo Switch, and each time, it sold over a million units. That also doesn’t bring up Mario and his mini-game-focused series, which just had another release and is likely to do well. People love mini-games, and they love these pocket monsters, so why not go forward with a full title?

The two biggest reasons could be content and money. On the former, it’s possible that the team couldn’t “think up enough games” to fill a whole mobile title, or that they were unsure of how to keep the content fresh to make it a game people kept coming back to. Or, they might have thought they wouldn’t make back dev costs, depending on how big the game was, or how to monetize the mini-games, etc.

We would rather it be the latter option, as making a bunch of mini-games based around Pokemon would be a snap, no pun intended. There are over a thousand of them, and that means there are millions of potential ideas that could’ve been capitalized on. Sadly, it wasn’t to be.