Pokemon’s Leaked Series Timeline Explained

The timeline of events throughout the Pokemon series is complicated – much, much more complicated than many fans just getting into the franchise would think. Various minor inconsistencies, rampant misinformation among fans, and the fact that there’s a lot more than just a single timeline to the Pokemon series are all factors that play into this complexity, but in one of the only instances in the franchise’s history, fans recently got a look at an official and pretty in-depth breakdown of the series’ timeline… or part of it, at least.

This information has its origins with the infamous “teraleak” that occurred earlier this month. This monumental data leak happened after an anonymous hacker gained access to Game Freak’s internal repositories earlier this year, and has since resulted in the internet being flooded with never-before-seen developmental Pokemon content from the past few decades. Alongside the personal information of over 2,600 employees and contractors, just about anything from concept art, source code, scrapped narrative details, glimpses at early game builds, and even some details regarding unreleased games has been leaked online.

How These Leaks Determine Part of The Pokemon Timeline

The data gleamed from these leaks is one rabbit hole, but the order of events throughout the multiple Pokemon continuities and timelines is another entirely. The leaked information regarding the main-series Pokemon timeline, as shared on Twitter by @CentroLeaks, states that the Gen 1 and Gen 3 games take place during the same year, around the same time. As fans know, the Gen 2 titles take place three years later, though the events of the Gen 4 games occur around the same time here – stated by Game Freak to take place “a little later” than the Gen 2 games. The first of the Gen 5 games, Pokemon Black and White, are then stated to occur 10 years after the events of the Gen 4 games.

The Gen 4 games are somewhat transparent about taking place at the same time as
Pokemon Gold and Silver
, as they begin with the player watching a news broadcast about the red Gyarados in the Lake of Rage.

This Isn’t The First Time Fans Have Gotten a Tip About The Pokemon Timeline

First of all, most of this isn’t technically new information. Many invested Pokemon theorists and fans have long been running with the idea that these games occur simultaneously, largely thanks to a long-deleted tweet from Toshinobu Matsumiya, a scenario writer at Game Freak who has been working on the series since Gen 1. This tweet, originally shared in May 2014, seemed to confirm that Gens 1 and 3 occur simultaneously, with Gens 2 and 4 similarly occurring at the same time later on in the timeline. Further, the tweet claimed that after the events of Pokemon Black and White, the sequels Pokemon Black 2 and White 2 also occurred at around the same time as Pokemon X and Y.

Fans Should Keep in Mind That Leaked Content Is Rarely Canon Content

Unlike this tweet, however, the information gleamed from the recent leaks actually adds slightly more context to the Pokemon timeline by clarifying the number of years that pass between the events of Gens 4 and 5. Many may even consider Matsumiya’s decade-old tweet to retrospectively lend credence to the timeline information that was recently leaked, as above all else, it’s crucial that fans understand that almost all the leaked Pokemon documents represent content that was in active development at the time. That means the canonicity of absolutely every piece of leaked content should be taken with a generous pinch of salt, as a lot of designs and narrative details ended up changing between development and release.

With the games themselves scarcely providing any detailed insight into the series’ timeline, it’s very possible this information could be swiftly retconned in the future. But as it is understood to the best of fans’ knowledge today, this is the most concrete and comprehensive layout of the timeline throughout the main series games – not factoring in the Pokemon remakes, spin-offs, manga, or the main anime series, all of which occur in either different continuities or, in some cases, different timelines within the same continuity.

The Pokemon Timeline Remains Something of a Mystery Beyond Gen 6

Of course, the elephant in the room is that this information doesn’t account for games past Gen 6. While Pokemon X and Y were included in Matsumiya’s timeline tweet, only loose theories are available to help fans pin Gens 7, 8, and 9 on the timeline. All that’s known about these games is that they do take place one after the other – something which is understood thanks only to very niche scraps of information in these games which reference the events of prior entries to the Pokemon series.