Pokémon
The original map for Pokémon Gold and Silver covered all of Japan and was huge
The versions of Pokémon Gold and Silver that were shown in their demos at Nintendo Space World 1997 had a very different map from the final versions, which represented all of Japan.
The beloved Johto region is where the adventures of the second-generation Pokémon games - the Gold, Silver, and Crystal version - take place, but the original plan was for these stories to take place not there, but all over Japan. In the first public version of these titles, which was the 1997 Nintendo Space World demo, the map was nothing more or less than all of Japan instead of a single region, but Game Freak discarded this idea due to difficulties in implementing it in the final version.
The map for Pokémon Gold and Silver at the 1997 Nintendo Space World was all of Japan, not just the Johto region
From November 21 to 23, 1997, Nintendo Space World, a Nintendo trade show originally called Shoshinkai, was held in Japan. One of the big attractions of this in-person event was the chance to play demos of the new versions of Pokémon, which were highly anticipated after the huge success of the first-generation titles.
Nothing more was known about these demos beyond the information and photos at the time until May 2018, when the ROMs of these versions of Pokémon Gold and Silver, so radically different from the final builds that were released, were leaked.
The titles were estimated to be around 80% complete, and their most interesting and striking aspect was their map, which represented all of Japan.
The entire map was not accessible during the demo, so gameplay was limited to a few villages and a road connecting them. But by using external tools with the ROMs, the true magnitude of the map could be seen. This immense and huge map was roughly a representation of the Japanese archipelago but rotated 90º clockwise. The four major islands of the country were represented: Hokkaido, Honshu, Shiroku, and Kyushu.
This demonstrated Game Freak’s enormous ambition with this first prototype of video games. While Kanto, the region of the first generation of games, was based on the actual Kantō region of Japan, for the new titles they decided not to settle for just one part of their nation, but to map the entire country.
In the final versions, however, the map was reduced to just two contiguous regions: Johto, inspired by the Kansai region, and Kanto. Although the exact reason why the original idea was discarded when the first prototype of the games was at such an advanced stage of development is unknown, it does not seem unreasonable to think that the concept of representing the entire country did not convince them and they had to rethink the map design.
In Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver, we begin our adventure in the Johto region, and once we complete the eight gyms, we reach the Pokémon League on the Indigo Plateau in Kanto.
This revelation was very shocking at the time, since these games not only began in an original region, but also b of the saga took place.
The sum of the Johto and Kanto maps in the final versions of the games results in a much larger gridded explorable area than the original map of all of Japan from the Space World demos.
It seems that Game Freak decided to focus on showing different regions based on real, well-detailed areas of Japan, rather than covering the entire country and risking that such samples of the most iconic areas would not have a decent level of detail due to space limitations.