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Here's what I think.
>The source is from Japan, because it's highly unlikely those assets were ever sent to a foreign country. Localization wasn't even being thought about when Red and Green came out.
>If it didn't originate in Japan, it's possible that these were provided to the NoA localization team early on by Game Freak when they were considering swapping out the "less cool" Pokémon for others. This is just speculation though, and it wouldn't explain why other assets unrelated to Pokémon are present
>Assuming Japan is the source, it either originated from an employee within Game Freak or as a test ROM given to one of the old guard's friends during development
If it is from a collector, then that collector's method was to look up the original staff and then try to identify their friends in the hope that one possessed a development copy. But this would have been from 1994 or 1995. There were no Game Boy emulators, and these are assets that are probably not running on a cartridge, but a makeshift PCB and Game Boy dev kit with SGB capabilities going by the included border.
