According to reports, Minecraft Hoenn Recreation was used by Pokemon fans to develop ORAS

Key insights

• One would have thought that the bizarre Pokemon leaks would stop after a while, but it is now claimed that Game Freak used a Minecraft replica of Hoenn to help develop Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire.
• A Reddit user named Bidoof_King shared his game to the Pokemon subreddit 11 years ago, and Game Freak appears to have used it in a mockup for ORAS’ flight mode.

Recent Pokémon leaks have spawned some absolutely wild stories in the last few days. Typhlosion went from public enemy number one to complete vindication in a matter of hours, while Game Freak appears to have been toying with the idea Inserting Lady Gaga’s song “Born This Way” into Pokémon X & Y. Concept art, scrapped developments, and details about future projects have all leaked on social media.

The absurdity keeps coming up too, as recently Twitter user Centro Leaks – one of the main sources for all this nonsense – claimed that Game Freak had allegedly used a fan-made Minecraft replica of Hoenn to help develop Pokemon Omega Ruby & Alpha to help Sapphire. This creation was created by a Reddit user named Bidoof_King and shared on the Pokemon subreddit 11 years ago.

According to reports, Minecraft Hoenn Recreation was used by Pokemon fans to develop ORAS

The post is a single image of a Minecraft version of about half of Hoenn, and Game Freak apparently used this image as part of a model for the game’s flight mechanics. In the image shared by Centro Leaks, we can see Bidoof_King’s Minecraft creation on the top screen, which features a boy flying with a Latios, while a more traditional map of Hoenn can be seen on the bottom screen.

Of course, this model was never intended to see the light of day and was most likely used as a placeholder while artists worked on official material. It clearly looks like someone at Game Freak was simply using the card as a proof of concept rather than for anything particularly nefarious, and the actual bird’s eye view we got of Hoenn in Pokemon Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire looks nothing at all like an impressive replica of Bidoof_King from .

In fact, even though the post used is 11 years old, Bidoof_King themselves have since commented on this revelation, stating that they were “blown away” and that it “made their day,” so no harm, no foul. It’s just another interesting glimpse into how development works at Game Freak – something we’ve been getting a lot lately – and a little reminder that Game Freak absolutely sees what you post on Reddit, so behave yourself your best side.