It was a gamble, along with Temtem Pansun a particularly tricky one — now, Pokémon fans are practically experts at spotting fakes, given how often opportunists attempt to pull a quick one on the neighborhood. Game Freak also had not declared Pokémon Sword and Shield however, which would make starters a huge leak.
It worked. A number of websites ran the pictures, and while they cautioned readers that the pictures could be bogus, the pictures still went wide. People started dissecting the designs, attempting to work out how closely they found Game Freak’s iconic monsters. Others examined the strangely inconsistent Japanese. All the time, Spagna was having a laugh.
Soon enough, the Italian came forward and took responsibility for this all by uploading a series of new images that proved that he faked it. „And I could not believe it.“
„I congratulate those who were not convinced […] But generally already the fact that I had this reach gets me understand that maybe I was able to create something really persuasive,“ he wrote. This wasn’t the cheap Temtem Pansun end of the narrative. That exact same year, Crema, a team of Spanish programmers launched a Kickstarter for Temtem, a promising-looking monster-collecting MMO.
