Pokemon Online Advanced

Pokemon Online Beta 1.0 — September 2000

Pokemon Online Beta 1.0, the legendary prototype from September 17, 2000. Created by Konidias and team (Caveman, Optimus Primus, Dragoness), this is the original playable beta that launched the POL phenomenon and inspired decades of Pokemon fan MMO projects. Features a working overworld, house interior, NPCs, and integrated community links. Confirmed working on Windows 11 (2026). Includes original team credits and full feature documentation. Previously considered lost media until recovery by doors98.com preservation project. Referenced in Bulbapedia's Pokémon Online (MMORPG) article. It has also been rebuilt as a playable in-browser recreation on the Doors 98 desktop — a clean-room reimplementation whose menu tree was read off the running pol.exe, whose art and 1024x800 Beta City map came out of the original game data, and whose dialogue is the verbatim text stored in pol.gam. What you can reach by playing it is roughly half of what is in it: a complete static teardown documents the flat Clickteam PAPP container and its run-length image codec, all 191 images, the object and instance layout, the six extension DLLs carved out of the executable, and the entire event logic — including a second, untagged event table at application level that turns out to drive the whole custom menu, and shows that Visit Gamedn.com, Help Guides, Character Editor and Trainer Pages have no handlers behind them at all. Four of the eight frames cannot be reached by anything in the program: a finished trainer ID card, a "Pokemon Pocket Organizer" holding a single dated development diary entry from 1 September 2000, a DirectPlay lobby that creates a session called polgame, and a connecting screen with a Pokéball rolling along a loading bar. Ninety-three of the 1,105 placed object instances can never be seen, six of the eighteen font records ask for a fan-made typeface named Pokémon that no Windows machine ships, and 96 dwords scattered through the file are uninitialized memory whose pointers land in the Windows 9x shared DLL arena — fixing the machine it was authored on. It is also readable on the desktop as pol-beta-readme.txt. Provenance for the file itself comes from the site that served it: the Wayback Machine's 9 November 2000 capture of pokemonol.com's POL:A download page lists polb1.zip at 541 kb — the size of the archive preserved here — alongside an older polbeta.zip (Alpha 1.0), an "Extreme Beta", a separately-offered cncs32.dll and an 8 kb Character Creator Dev Kit, none of which the crawler saved. That page also explains the game's otherwise inexplicable Other menu: Help Guides and Trainer Pages name sections of the website's own navigation — Online Guide and Member Pages — pasted into a game that never got the code to open them. A second capture, of the POL:A information page from 16 December 2000, supplies the rest: it published the planned feature list, and a character editor, a customizable ID card with a pokedex, an in-game cellphone with email and a per-player profile page are all on it. Three months earlier, several of those already existed in pol.gam as finished screens with no way in. What shipped is the first town of a promised thirty-town world, with the rest drawn and never connected.