Pokémon dev Game Freak appears to have suffered a 'teraleak' that includes 25+ years of never-before-seen Pokémon art, assets, documents, and even canceled movies

First reported by Nintendo Life, there has been a flood of never-before-seen Pokémon art, design documents, and other development material on social media, all apparently originating from a catastrophic security breach of Pokémon developer Game Freak. Game Freak itself has put out a statement confirming it was hacked and that employees' names and contact information have been compromised.

Much of the material reportedly from the leak is being shared to X, «The Everything App» by CentroLeaks, an established source on Pokémon leaks and rumors, but the PokeLeaks subreddit is also awash with content supposedly obtained in the hack, which CentroLeaks has dubbed the «teraleak» in reference to the similar 2020 «gigaleak» suffered by Nintendo.

A moderator on r/PokeLeaks, vagrantwade, has said that their team is «having to sift through a bunch of fakes that people are now trying to sneak through,» and it is currently difficult to determine the provenance of individual posts. With that caveat, some of what I've seen so far includes:

Game Freak uploaded a Japanese-language statement on October 10 confirming that it was hacked, but notably has not yet confirmed that Pokémon design materials were part of that hack. Looking at (presumably machine-generated) translations from Twitter users Adrien190303 and brayshgaming, Game Freak states that its servers were breached in August. Game Freak disclosed that the names and work email addresses of 2,606 current and former employees, as well as external contractors, were compromised in the hack. For perspective, according to Wikipedia, Game Freak has 207 active employees as of this year.

The Pokémon brand is co-owned by Nintendo and the Pokémon Company, but Game Freak⁠—particularly its co-founders, Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori⁠—created the property. Game Freak continues to be the developer of all main line Pokémon games while being involved in the production of spin-offs and adaptations.

We're still weathering the initial tidal wave