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From Glitch City Laboratories

The term Alpha, sometimes referred to as a "Private Beta" is used to refer to a program in a software-release life cycle which has not yet been fully tested according to its current amount of features, although testing is partly in progress, usually by brief methods such as white box techniques. Software in its Alpha stage is not feature complete but will leave its stage and enter the early Beta stage when all of the planned features have been implemented into the software. It is not to be confused with Beta; the stage when the software has become feature complete and it is thoroughly tested to ensure that each feature is necessary, or accessible and if so, if ammendments should and will be made to remove such features which may be unsuitable for the target audience or impossible for the final release due to time constraints or technical limitations.

Understandably it is named after the Greek letter Alpha; the first letter in the Greek alphabet because it is the first stage in software development. However, sometimes the term Pre-Alpha is used to refer to the stage when the game has not yet been tested at all, or when planning and a requirements analysis is still in progress.

In the Pokémon/Pokémon glitch community

When informally evaluating unreleased elements of the Pokémon franchise, it is much more common that players tends to refer to all unreleased elements of a Pokémon as simply part of a 'Beta' version. Whilst this is logical for elements which still exist within the final game but are inaccessible for normal gameplay such as the BIRD Type, it may be more suitable to refer to materials such as sketches as part of an Alpha or Pre-Alpha version because if these features are found to be buggy or difficult to implement into the game such as the early concept of a Skateboard on Pokémon Gold and Silver, what the game developers class as being 'feature complete' may change as the game is being developed.