Hydrei Historia: An Unofficial Pokemon Timeline

[Yung Dramps]

Another day, another overly intricate Yung Dramps spreadsheet

So, here's the juice. Lemme just copypaste the first worksheet as an introduction to what this all is...

A More Detailed Introduction

On May 7th, 2014, something interesting happened: A leak. Pokemon stuff gets leaked all the damn time, but this leak was intriguing for two reasons, those being who did it and what they revealed. The "leaker" in this instance was none other than Toshinobu Matsumiya, a prolific writer at Game Freak, and their revelation was that despite the series not putting a massive focus on continuity, there was in fact an internal timeline for the main series games. Gen 1/3, Gen 2/4, BW1 and Gen 5 sequels/Gen 6: That was the order they gave before their tweet was deleted.

In the 7 years since this tweet, it has continued circulation as a common bulletpoint on Pokemon trivia videos, amounting to little more than that. As you may have inferred, I have decided to expand this further into a timeline of the entire series counting not just the games, but significant events in the Pokemon universe, whether it be the specific date of discovery of certain species, creation of artificial Pokemon, formative events in the lives of major characters, basically anything of that sort that can be properly dated. In order to date stuff, we will be using a custom dating system: BR (Before Red) and AR (After Red). As the name implies, this system makes the Generation 1 games "Year Zero" with everything before or after that being marked appropriately.

One important disclaimer: This is not even close to definitive. If the necessity of a custom dating system didn't tip you off, this timeline is absolutely gonna be filled with conjecture and rummaging through contradictory information. We can never have a truly definitive timeline unless the license-holders give it to us, which they likely never will. In order to explain the thought process behind certain placements, citation notes will be included for the more obscure placements.

So, now that that's all out of the way, what's next? Is this just gonna sit here forever? Absolutely not. And that's where you all come in.

Unlike with my previous two spreadsheets (Which Pokemon Were Used The Most By Important NPCs and Every Pokemon Seen So Far In The Journeys Anime), the scope of this is way, WAY bigger. With those two I had a clear focus on where exactly to look; on the other hand, this sheet will encompass Pokedex entries, story lore, side attractions and much much more that I just don't have the time or energy to comb through every last bit of. This is absolutely a WIP, and I need your help to soup it up. I implore you all to drop events worth cataloguing alongside suggestions for their placements within the BR/AR system. I would also like feedback on the suggested spinoff additions in the 4th worksheet, as well as maybe deleting/adjusting stuff that's too headcanony (e.g. the Pokemon Legends/Mewtwo creation placements).

Aight, that's all for now! Cut loose, OI users!

 

[QuentinQuonce]

Another day, another overly intricate Yung Dramps spreadsheet

So, here's the juice. Lemme just copypaste the first worksheet as an introduction to what this all is...

A More Detailed Introduction

On May 7th, 2014, something interesting happened: A leak. Pokemon stuff gets leaked all the damn time, but this leak was intriguing for two reasons, those being who did it and what they revealed. The "leaker" in this instance was none other than Toshinobu Matsumiya, a prolific writer at Game Freak, and their revelation was that despite the series not putting a massive focus on continuity, there was in fact an internal timeline for the main series games. Gen 1/3, Gen 2/4, BW1 and Gen 5 sequels/Gen 6: That was the order they gave before their tweet was deleted.

In the 7 years since this tweet, it has continued circulation as a common bulletpoint on Pokemon trivia videos, amounting to little more than that. As you may have inferred, I have decided to expand this further into a timeline of the entire series counting not just the games, but significant events in the Pokemon universe, whether it be the specific date of discovery of certain species, creation of artificial Pokemon, formative events in the lives of major characters, basically anything of that sort that can be properly dated. In order to date stuff, we will be using a custom dating system: BR (Before Red) and AR (After Red). As the name implies, this system makes the Generation 1 games "Year Zero" with everything before or after that being marked appropriately.

One important disclaimer: This is not even close to definitive. If the necessity of a custom dating system didn't tip you off, this timeline is absolutely gonna be filled with conjecture and rummaging through contradictory information. We can never have a truly definitive timeline unless the license-holders give it to us, which they likely never will. In order to explain the thought process behind certain placements, citation notes will be included for the more obscure placements.

So, now that that's all out of the way, what's next? Is this just gonna sit here forever? Absolutely not. And that's where you all come in.

Unlike with my previous two spreadsheets (Which Pokemon Were Used The Most By Important NPCs and Every Pokemon Seen So Far In The Journeys Anime), the scope of this is way, WAY bigger. With those two I had a clear focus on where exactly to look; on the other hand, this sheet will encompass Pokedex entries, story lore, side attractions and much much more that I just don't have the time or energy to comb through every last bit of. This is absolutely a WIP, and I need your help to soup it up. I implore you all to drop events worth cataloguing alongside suggestions for their placements within the BR/AR system. I would also like feedback on the suggested spinoff additions in the 4th worksheet, as well as maybe deleting/adjusting stuff that's too headcanony (e.g. the Pokemon Legends/Mewtwo creation placements).

Aight, that's all for now! Cut loose, OI users!

I'm sure you've probably seen it but for anyone that hasn't Bulbapedia's page on the timeline of the series is the most thorough/definitive source on the topic I've seen. It's mostly game-specific but incorporates a few choice elements from other canons like the anime, and includes many spin-offs, including Pokemon Ranger and My Pokemon Ranch.

There are a few janky bits (they have Pokemon Colosseum occurring shortly after Gen I/III and then XD two years after Gen II/IV, seemingly arbitrarily - nothing really indicates when these games take place relative to the main series so it's as good as any other placement I guess) but for the most part it's well-backed up, and draws from Pokedex entries as well as info from NPCs and in-game text.

 

[Yung Dramps]

I'm sure you've probably seen it but for anyone that hasn't Bulbapedia's page on the timeline of the series is the most thorough/definitive source on the topic I've seen. It's mostly game-specific but incorporates a few choice elements from other canons like the anime, and includes many spin-offs, including Pokemon Ranger and My Pokemon Ranch.

There are a few janky bits (they have Pokemon Colosseum occurring shortly after Gen I/III and then XD two years after Gen II/IV, seemingly arbitrarily - nothing really indicates when these games take place relative to the main series so it's as good as any other placement I guess) but for the most part it's well-backed up, and draws from Pokedex entries as well as info from NPCs and in-game text.

Yoooo! I actually was not aware of this! Thanks a lot, some of this is too assumption-heavy/headcanony/not properly dated to be included as you said, but it's incredibly helpful nonetheless.

 

[ScraftyIsTheBest]

I do wonder if there's any sort of indication of where Sword and Shield's events fall on the greater timeline as a whole. The game's story is so incredibly isolated from every other game's story to the point that there's no mention of any other game's events at all in Sword and Shield, and the lack of Megas or Z-Moves in the game does raise the question if the game also takes place in yet another AU from the others so far.

I am not sure if they will ever acknowledge where it falls, but Sword and Shield's events are an interesting beast in and of itself because the game itself is very isolated from the others and has no indication of where it falls on the greater continuity, none of the other games' events are even lampshaded at in the game.

 

[QuentinQuonce]

Been thinking about this since my earlier post and something occurred to me; in recent years I think the games have caught up to, or are at least mimicking, the real-world timeline because GF is setting them in the present day.

What do I mean? Well, I got on this line of thought due to the Pokedex entry for Porygon in Pokemon Sun:

Roughly 20 years ago, it was artificially created, utilizing the latest technology of the time.

In SM, Porygon is said to have been created "roughly 20 years ago" - i.e. when Red and Blue were first released. This works both as a shoutout to it being the 20th anniversary of the franchise but also as a reference to the time that has passed. Given that it's obtainable in RBY (and a lot of the tie-in media like the trading card game states it to be a new and desirable Pokemon) we can infer it was created/released shortly before Red and Blue begin their journey.

This, incidentally, would put Red and Blue in their late 20s in SM/USUM, which seems pretty plausible based on the noticeable maturation of their sprites.

I don't think this was the intention early on, hence RSE and DPP being contemporaneous with RBY and GSC despite being released several years later. In the early years of the series, the only thing that really worked as a timeline indicator was the introduction of new Pokemon, which didn't matter as the games were in order. GSC come after RBY so there are new Pokemon, simple. But as remakes have happened and the timeline has become slightly more convoluted, these sorts of references make less and less sense. In Pokemon XD, for instance, Bonsly is said to be a very rare and little-known new species. If we assume that Bonsly wasn't discovered until shortly before the events of DPPHGSS this could be so. But for this to be possible, Colosseum would have to take place many years before RSEFRLG; and the fact that those games can link up with it indicates that it takes place at more or less the same time, unless you accept total gameplay and story segregation. So it becomes rather pointless to use the number of Pokemon as an indicator of the timeline. More recent Pokemon games simply make it explicit there are hundreds - potentially thousands - more Pokemon in the world than we've yet seen.

So what do we know? We know that Gens I and III are roughly contemporaneous, as are Gens II and IV - it's indicated that FRLG takes place shortly after RSE, and that DPP occurs not too long after HGSS. Gen V in turn takes place at least seven, eight, or nine years on from HGSS (going by the age of the Icirrus Rocket Grunt's son). B2W2 and the Kalos games take place two years after, and SwSh are presumably some time after them (though as ScraftyIsTheBest notes, virtually nothing definitely indicates where those games fall); as the trend in recent years seems to be that each new game comes slightly after the last, it seems reasonable to assume that they are in turn a couple of years on from the Alola titles.

Below is a rough timeline of which years the games take place in. By design, they largely match the dates the games were originally released in Japan. The real-world years here are only used as a marker, and do not necessarily correspond to whatever calendar system is in place in the actual games - for all we know, the current year in the gameverse is 3064. That said, it's very clear to me that not only is RBY is supposed to take place more or less in the year it was released in in Japan, but also that it is supposed to be more or less in the real world or a version of it. The presence of the 1969 space shuttle and the explicit referencing of real-world locations point strongly to it being set in more or less the present day. No other game has had such an explicit tether to the real world, but that's more due to the general earth drift that's taken place over the series, with real-world regions replacing the earth locations occasionally referred to.



RBY and RSE 1996

HGSS and DPP 1999

BW ~2010

B2W2 and XY ~2012

SM/USUM ~2014-2016*

SwSh 2019



*Grimsley's concept art in SM/USUM is marked "Grimsley: 2 years later" indicating that SM/USUM take place 2 years after B2W2. In the absence of any other definitive indicator it seems logical to accept this.

 

[Yung Dramps]

Before publishing this thread I actually had SWSH placed at 23 AR for a time. I extrapolated this via the fact that commercial drones became publicly available about 3 years after the first Ipad came out, represented in Pokemon by the stadium rotom drones and Gen 7's Rotom-Dex respectively. I ultimately determined this was too flimsy and settled for the label it currently has, but with the post above me I'm reconsidering that placement!

Upon looking at what's done so far, I gotta say I'm thoroughly impressed by how relatively clean this all is. I was expecting a clusterfuck of contradictions and shoddy info, but there's a remarkable consistency here: For example, the first written languages being created in 1500 BR doesn't contradict any of the stuff older than it as far as I can tell since ancient depictions of stuff like the Darkest Day and Kyogre and Groudon's battles are done entirely through pictures with no old-timey text.

 

[SadisticMystic]

Elsewhere on Bulbapedia, they extrapolate two bounding lines:
-The fact that Porygon, the high-end Game Corner prize from R/G/B/Y, was ready to buy in those games, combined with Porygon's dex entry from Sun/US/UM as already mentioned, provides an upper bound of 20 years as the span between the Kanto and Alola arcs.
-They also provide a lower bound: in addition to the overt gaps given in story (3 years RGBY->GSC, 2 years BW->B2W2), they point to Anabel's story in the UB episode of S/M. During Kartana's/Celesteela's chapter, Looker explains that Anabel had been exposed to a (then-unknown) Ultra Wormhole 10 years ago while they were working together. Since Anabel appears as the Frontier Brain of the Battle Tower in Emerald, and makes no mention of that experience in her dialog there, and since RGBY/RSE are set at the same time (as flavored by the saga to get FRLG<->RSE trades working being a matter of "trading over a long distance" as opposed to "trading through time" like the Time Capsule in GSC), they take that as proof that Anabel must have been "uncorrupted" by UB worlds as of her Emerald appearance, and therefore that the lower bound for that gap is at least 10 years.

Given these fenceposts, the real option is likely a lot closer to the 20 end than the 10 end, and not just because of the real-world time gap between game releases. The first time you go back to your house after completing episode RR in USUM, you're treated to an expository cutscene with minimal interaction, in which it's revealed that the Alola mom was once "the infamous Scratch Cat Girl from Kanto". If, as would be expected for a character with that apparent level of notability, this represents someone we could have possibly seen before, there is only one feasible candidate: a Lass on Route 8, later given the name Andrea when ordinary trainers received visible names in FRLG and LGPE. She has a team of three Meowths, and this introductory text at the start of battle: "MEOWTH is so cute, meow, meow, meow!" Certainly sounds like the right one, huh? Assuming that's an accurate assessment, then whatever time elapsed from Kanto->Alola, must have been enough time for Andrea to finish growing up, have a kid, wait for that kid to age up to 11, presumably downsize to just one Meowth, and move to Alola together. Even if a Lass was still a relative newcomer to training, only slightly older than Red, 20 years is still a feasible timeline for all that to happen, while 10 is absolutely not. Bulbapedia makes no mention of the Andrea hypothesis anywhere, though its Japanese equivalent does.

There's one other complicating factor about Kanto: In LGPE, Mina appears. From a logistical standpoint, it's clear that the reason for this cameo is that because several original Pokemon received the Fairy type, or a regional form that had that type, and they had never before been able to exhibit that type in a Kanto game, the world designers wanted a recognizable Fairy specialist who could group those Pokemon together on a theme team. But that particular choice of trainer runs into continuity problems: From Lana, we know there's an age limit for captains, and if the Kanto->Alola gap really is 20 years, then in order for Mina to qualify under that limit as of the Alola arc, she could not have even been born yet as of the Kanto one. Just narrowing the gap slightly to 18-19 years doesn't really help either: the fact remains that not only does Mina exist, she's also aged up to a point where she's capable of speaking coherently, training and battling Pokemon, and taking up artistry as a conscious habit. I think that appearance in particular, if not the entire existence of Let's Go, has to be written out of the official continuity, or there's no way to reconcile the whole thing.

 

[Yung Dramps]

I think that appearance in particular, if not the entire existence of Let's Go, has to be written out of the official continuity, or there's no way to reconcile the whole thing.

That's exactly what I've done, as a matter of fact! Unlike other remakes the structure of Let's Go makes it irreconciable with the other versions of Gen 1, what with Red and Blue seemingly already having undergone their journeys while everything else about Kanto including the E4 and Team Rocket is the same. On the off-chance a future game directly references or follows from it I'm just gonna add a dedicated section for it as an alternate/split timeline or something cuz boy howdy it just doesn't make sense with the main one.

 

[Scorpio]

LGPE exists literally because KANTOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, timeline be damned

 

[DrPumpkinz]

The number of Os following an all-caps Kanto is directly proportional to how annoying the Kanto bitching is.

EDIT: Just so this isn't a one-liner, we know for certain that Sword and Shield takes place after Sun and Moon because of Type: Null and Silvally. Specifically, Silvally got its name during the events of Sun and Moon when Gladion evolved Type: Null.

 

[Scorpio]

*Grimsley's concept art in SM/USUM is marked "Grimsley: 2 years later" indicating that SM/USUM take place 2 years after B2W2. In the absence of any other definitive indicator it seems logical to accept this.

I tried looking up the ages for Dexio and Sina, but couldn’t find anything (plus, the chibi vs not-chibi models kinda messes with things), so I guess this is what we have to go on.

Also

The number of Os following an all-caps Kanto is directly proportional to how annoying the Kanto bitching is.

Is this a threat

 

[R_N]

The number of Os following an all-caps Kanto is directly proportional to how annoying the Kanto bitching is.

EDIT: Just so this isn't a one-liner, we know for certain that Sword and Shield takes place after Sun and Moon because of Type: Null and Silvally. Specifically, Silvally got its name during the events of Sun and Moon when Gladion evolved Type: Null.

Likewise I think the UBs had to be named during the events of SM. They just get labeled as ??? until you catch them and used codenames by the Foundation otherwise.

Granted, USUM does kind of throw a work into that but that could just be for smoothing out gameplay (& Poipole can just have been the name given to it in its native land anyway).

 

[Bakugames]

This is really cool and reminds me of people trying to figure out the pokemon special timeline. Do these timelines take oras/frlg/hgss as interchangeable or different dimensions?

 

[R_N]

This is really cool and reminds me of people trying to figure out the pokemon special timeline. Do these timelines take oras/frlg/hgss as interchangeable or different dimensions?

I think "different dimension, but in an interchangable place" if that makes sense

IE: ORAS likely still takes place roughly concurrently with whatever is going on with Kanto (which i guess for sake of conversation I'll just assume was FRLG but megas were there), but RSE is in its own parallel timeline that doesn't necessarily connect with where we are in the present

iirc if you bring a GBA-era pokemon through bank to ORAS they specify "arrived after a long travel through time & space" where as in gen 5 games its "arrived after a long travel through time" or something to that effect. I don't think XY had that probably because the idea wasn't fully conceptualized.


Course broad strokes most of the major changes don't necessarily mean anything. Megas could hypothetically still exist in the "original" timeline and just arbitraily not present and they only matter in ORAS. Put another way I guess you could just put an asterisk of "AU but it doesnt matter unless specified"

 

[Yung Dramps]

This is really cool and reminds me of people trying to figure out the pokemon special timeline. Do these timelines take oras/frlg/hgss as interchangeable or different dimensions?

Yeah, pretty much. I've always thought an individual universe/timeline could have the same sequence of mainline games, with the version being mixed and matched. For example, timeline 1 could have RBY Kanto followed by HGSS Johto while timeline 2 could have FRLG Kanto and Crystal Johto, so on and so forth. Only exception is LGPE for the reasons discussed above

 

[R_N]

You know I guess it's kind of relevant that so far as the sinnoh games are concerned, Platinum is the canon one. Cynthia compares Hilda/Hilbert specifically (the dialog in BW2 specifically removed both references to That Trainer, sorry Rosa/Nate you're just randos to her!) to the trainer who fought Giratina.

Emerald (the only other one where this could feasibly matter) sidestepped this entirely since iirc "rayquaza came to stop things" & "the hoenn battle frontier" is never brought up until after we've already had AUs as an explicit thing.

 

[PokemonCrusader]

The number of Os following an all-caps Kanto is directly proportional to how annoying the Kanto bitching is.

EDIT: Just so this isn't a one-liner, we know for certain that Sword and Shield takes place after Sun and Moon because of Type: Null and Silvally. Specifically, Silvally got its name during the events of Sun and Moon when Gladion evolved Type: Null.

Complaining about Kanto has hilariously enough replaced Genwunners on the annoying scale.

 

[Yung Dramps]

Alright, so based off green_typhlosion's hypothesis I've decided to bite the bullet and place SWSH at 23 AR. In addition, because of this we now have Opal's birth year as well as a timeframe for Mustard's champion run!

 

[Buzzer_Error]

A bizarre thought: if the placement of Legends: Arceus in this timeline is even roughly correct, Opal’s birth and childhood are closer to those games than they are to SWSH

 

[Yung Dramps]

Minor addition: Cyrus birthday at 24 BR. Meant to do this for the past week but kept forgetting