>>48725012Just for the record, they didn't actually "pick" anything.
Due to game freak incompetence and overall horribly coded gold and silver (which had to be fixed by Iwata), they were forced to simply "roll over" the color palette, what you're seeing is not really shiny espeon color palette, it's just whatever suitable palette was next to the regular espeon palette.
They did this until gen 5, which is why you see a sudden, drastic improvement where shinies are actually hand picked.
