Pokemon Online Beta 1.0, the prototype dated 17 September 2000. Created by Konidias with Caveman (graphics), Optimus Primus (concept) and Dragoness (story) — the original playable beta that launched the POL phenomenon and inspired decades of Pokemon fan MMO projects. A working overworld, a house interior, an NPC, and integrated community links. Confirmed working on Windows 11 (2026). Previously considered lost media until recovery by the doors98.com preservation project.

It is also rebuilt as a playable in-browser recreation on this desktop — open it at /pol-beta.

The Wayback Machine still holds pokemonol.com's own download page from 9 November 2000, seven weeks after this build. It listed five files: polb1.zip (541 kb — this one), polbeta.zip (the older Alpha 1.0, 319 kb), exbeta.zip ("Extreme Beta", 883 kb), cncs32.dll offered separately "if needed when starting pol" (167 kb), and an 8 kb Character Creator Dev Kit. The crawler saved the page but none of the files. The archive here is polb1.zip at 554,117 bytes — 541.1 KB — matching the size that page advertised; the other three appear to be gone.

A second capture, of the POL:A information page from 16 December 2000, published the planned feature list — and it explains the screens in this build that you cannot reach. A character editor, a customizable ID card with a pokedex, an in-game cellphone with email, a profile page for every player, over thirty towns with gyms and all 251 Pokémon. Three months earlier, several of those already existed in pol.gam as finished screens with no way in: the ID card, the "Pokemon Pocket Organizer" and its Communication section. What shipped is the first town of a thirty-town world, with the rest drawn and never connected.

What you can reach by playing it is about half of what is in it. The file also holds a finished trainer ID card, a finished "Pokemon Pocket Organizer" with a dated development diary entry inside it, a DirectPlay multiplayer lobby with Host and Join buttons, a connecting screen with a rolling Pokeball, and a complete networked-player implementation sitting in both playable frames waiting for a server that was three days away in September 2000 and never arrived. Nothing in the program jumps to any of those screens.

A complete static teardown — the Clickteam PAPP container, all 191 images, the object and instance layout, the entire event logic including a second event table that turns out to drive the whole custom menu, the hidden content, and the extraction toolchain — is in pol-beta-readme.txt in this folder, and served raw at /apps/pol/beta/pol-beta-readme.txt.