So in 2003, when I was thirteen, I had a popular sprite request thread on the PokéMasters forums, early in the history of Pokémon sprite edits, when this was still a new thing only a few people were doing. On December 29th 2003, I made this sprite as a request, presumably for the TPM thread:
The sprite was saved as "dragon.png". It's a splice, made of existing sprites put together with some scratch edits: specifically, I used the body of my Gold version Charizard revamp, the head and tail of my Crystal version Lugia revamp, the wings of the R/S Charizard, and the forward-facing claws of the Yellow version Pidgeot, edited to erase what I interpreted as the left toe on the right foot and the right toe on the left foot (today, I think what I saw at the time as the right toe of Pidgeot's foot is actually the other foot). (I'm not totally sure whether the back-facing claw was taken off some other sprite or if I added it from scratch based on the other claws; I haven't found another sprite that matches it.)
(I don't totally remember the nature of the request, and my TPM sprite thread unfortunately seems lost to time; however, if I were to guess, I would guess that this dragon being a wyvern and having Lugia's head wasn't my idea: I had pretty particular ideas about what I felt dragons should look like as a kid, which definitely included having six limbs, and I didn't really consider Lugia one and wasn't a huge fan of Lugia as a Pokémon. On the other hand, some of the other specifics probably were: the exact sprites I used were almost certainly my idea, since I tended to use my own revamps in requested splices if I just liked them better than the R/S sprite of the Pokémon. And amusingly, if you've read The Quest for the Legends, I think this sprite shares some design DNA with Chalenor, who I designed around a similar time - the Lugiaesque tail and the black body with colored slashlike markings is quite similar, even if one is a dragon and the other a cat!)
At any rate, after making it, I put dragon.png in my sprite gallery, where I stuck every sprite I made, with a caption that just said, "A requested, cool dragon pokémon." A while later, I revamped and reorganized my sprite gallery and took out a bunch of sprites I considered old and embarrassing for one reason or another; dragon.png was one of those that got the axe. Something that always bugged me about it was how the feet seemed to be angled wrong - I thought I was being super clever using the same foot twice and removing a different toe from each copy to make them appear to be two feet at different angles, but the angle on both was wrong, and that's still where my eyes are immediately drawn when I look at it. All in all, the sprite hasn't been anywhere public under my name since I silently removed it from the gallery.
I hadn't thought of it in years, either, until this Tuesday, when I got a very excited e-mail from an Italian Pokémon fan. You see, since no later than 2005, my dragon.png sprite has been an infamous urban legend in Italy specifically, a rumour on the level of Mew under the truck or Pikablu. Some Italian who visited my sprite gallery back when dragon.png was still in it took a shine to it, put it into fake screenshots of FireRed and LeafGreen, named it Luxor, and spread a classic sort of playground rumour where this Pokémon could be unlocked in the Japanese version only by following an elaborate sequence of steps. Supposedly, catching Luxor would delete every Pokémon in your party or in the box you put it in.
In the years since, people had made wiki entries, fanart, fake cards of Luxor. There's an entire 22-minute Italian-language YouTube video about Luxor. I never heard about it because the rumour was only ever properly a thing in Italy; Italian visitors to The Cave of Dragonflies never connected it to me because the sprite wasn't on the site anymore. Plush had only dug it up by trawling through archive.org and stumbling upon it in an archived version of my gallery from when dragon.png was still in it. For more than twenty years my sprite has been an urban legend Pokégod and I had no idea! Wow!
Anyway, I'm incredibly tickled about this, and I gather Plush is currently writing up a website about Luxor and the discovery journey, which I can't wait to see and will be sure to link when it's up. In the meantime, in honor of this discovery, I decided to draw a new take on Luxor. I never gave dragon.png a name at the time, but I'm happy to embrace that it has taken on a life of its own. Luxor it is!
