pol.exe (the "gf" icon on the desktop) is a playable, in-browser recreation of Pokemon Online Advanced Beta 1.0 — the fan-made Pokemon MMORPG demo released September 17, 2000 by Konidias and the POL team (Caveman, Optimus Primus, Dragoness) during the Bulbagarden.com/pol era. It is the build that made POL famous, and it was considered lost media until the original pol.exe was recovered for this site's Downloads folder.
Click START GAME on the Mewtwo title screen and you are standing in Beta City. Arrow keys walk. Shift talks to people and switches things on; Space closes a speech box. Go inside the house, talk to Caveman, watch the TV and switch the radio on — that is the feature list the original's own ABOUT GAME screen advertised. The Other menu still opens the team's Game Credits box and the three community sites they linked, which now point at Wayback captures from autumn 2000. Reading the original's event tables turns up something you cannot see by clicking: only two of those three links ever worked. Visit Gamedn.com has no handler behind it at all.
Two things are faithfully broken, because they were broken in 2000. The ABOUT screen promises Shift will "read signs," but the signs in Beta City are scenery — they are backdrop objects, which in Multimedia Fusion cannot carry events, and pressing Shift at one does nothing from either side. And the Help Guides, Character Editor and Trainer Pages menus do nothing at all; neither does Enter, which in the alpha opened a "Pokemon Pocket Organizer" whose screen is still sitting unused inside the game file. None of that is missing from the recreation — it is missing from the game.
There is also an easter egg, or a bug, depending on how charitable you feel: walk to the very bottom of the map and you drop off the edge, underneath everything. Nothing collides down there, so you can stroll straight across the river — only the top of your head visible above the bottom of the screen — and climb back out on the far bank, in the tall grass that spells POL.
The "gf" desktop icon is not a stand-in: it is the icon the real pol.exe carries, the stock Games Factory badge that a Windows shortcut to the game would have shown in 2000.
HOW IT WAS REBUILT
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It is a clean-room reimplementation, not an emulator:
• The Main / Options / Other menu tree was read off the running program with the Windows menu API, so the wording, order, accelerators and separators are the original's.
• The game data file (pol.gam) turned out to use an undocumented Clickteam container that no existing tool could read, so a decoder was written for it. That yielded all 191 original graphics, the frame list (Beta City is 1024x800; House 1 is 384x256), and every line of dialogue as stored text — so nothing in the speech boxes is paraphrased.
• The maps were not screenshotted — the frame's object table decoded, giving all 1,105 objects with their exact coordinates, so Beta City and House 1 could be re-rendered from the game's own placement data. Rendering them from the file alone reproduces captures of the running game exactly: 100% of pixels identical, with a mean difference of zero.
• Collision comes from Multimedia Fusion's own per-object "obstacle" flag, so what blocks you is what blocked you in 2000 — not a hand-drawn approximation.
• The music is the game's own embedded "technosong" MIDI, rendered to audio. There is no background music in POL — that MIDI is referenced only by the House 1 frame, so it is the radio's music: the game is silent until you switch the radio on indoors, which is exactly what Caveman asks you to do. It is also a 1995 MIDI by Kevin Newman that the game shipped with, not an original POL composition.
• The result was rebuilt as an Angular canvas app on the Doors 98 desktop.
All of that, and a good deal more, is written up in full: the complete static teardown documents the container format, all 191 images, the entire event logic, and the four screens the game cannot reach — a finished trainer ID card, a "Pokemon Pocket Organizer" with a dated development diary entry inside it, a DirectPlay multiplayer lobby, and a connecting screen with a Pokeball rolling along a loading bar.
Original game at archive.orgOpen the recreationRead the complete teardown