Interestingly, the June 13th design seems to have originally been made without color, and the Yellow colors on both designs suggest inspiration for its golden colored shiny design! The June 13th design also hints at the tails being inspiration for Marills final design, back when it still had a curvy tail and had a pink color! (I'll talk about Beta Marill another time but it's worth noting)

It's unknown where some of these sprites leaked because I don't think there are multiple different 1999 Spaceworld demos out there, so I have no idea where the first one came from

Also for further reference, I have included sprite recreations by the wonderful @RacieBeep on Twitter! Use these recreations in the style of Ken Sugimori's old art as a better way to interpret the designs!

this series of posts is basically if Dr Lava was like, a lot more bias /hj (also dr lava is where i got the chart of the design changes, the third one is the final design!!!)