Articuno may be Pokemon Go's first legendary

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Everyone just calm down a minute, take a breath. There are several images and videos of an Articuno legendary in Pokemon Go and boy are the community losing their shit. 

There are two main reasons for the chaos right now: firstly it seems impossible to prove and, secondly, one of the people claiming to have it says it was a gift from Niantic: "they just emailed me back tonight stating they were gifting me with it!..and i'll be darned - it was right there in my pokedex!"

Before we go any further lets take a look at some of the images: 

As you can see both Team Instinct and Mystic are claiming to have one, with the Mystic version appearing to be in Ohio, while the Instinct one is in Jacksonville, Florida. Here's a video from the Mystic owner Kaitlyn Covey: 

The video looks real enough, but the fact that only two seem to exist and no one else has seen them, combined with the odd way they were apparently gifted out, is extremely suspicious (and note there's no video or additional images for the Instinct Articuno). 

Many people have pointed to a program called Pokemon Go MITM Proxy which lets you intercept the apps server traffic and effectively hack the game as a possible way of faking it. Given the high quality of fakes in recent years it's certainly not impossible this is a well modelled fan creation reskining something like a Pidgeot.

There's no word or confirmation from Niantic yet. 

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Leon Hurley
Leon Hurley
Managing editor for guides

I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for guides. I also write reviews, previews and features, largely about horror, action adventure, FPS and open world games. I previously worked on Kotaku, and the Official PlayStation Magazine and website.