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Here's some trivia from the December 1996 issue of CoroCoro, released in November 1996. They're currently giving a lot of focus to Pokémon Blue, and this bit stood out to me.
>It has been decided that the protagonist is "Blue"!! There are 3 rivals!?
This is the first instance I've seen where the Gen I protagonist is called "Red" and the Gen I rival is called "Green". However, it distinguishes the protagonist of RG with the protagonist of Blue and says that the latter is his own character, Blue. Considering the game had been released by this point, this is blatant misinformation, but it may have been intended during Blue's development and the information was provided to the staff by Game Freak. Both Red and Green were meant to be rivals to Blue during the story.
I don't even know why they blank out "Blue" in the image, because you can see him right there on the title screen on the prior page. But Gold and Silver were in development prior to Blue and use "Blue" as the name of one of the Gym Leaders/League Champions with the overworld sprite of the Gen I protagonist in the leaked ROM. This may imply that Red was a separate character even during that part of development.
