Nearly 20 years later, the showcase for the second Pokémon movie, Pokémon 2000 Adventure, has surfaced.
When talking about nostalgia and childhood memories, Pokémon is one of the common topics that people like to talk about. Combined with games, movies, cartoons, and promotional content of Pokémon usually made the memories stronger to remember. As we all know, Pokémon has been owned by Nintendo since its creation, and there is no way we could see any of its games on the PC platform due to exclusivity.
However, there was some promotional content out there that was released for the PCs to reach more audiences back in the day. One of the promotional showcases was the short-lived interactive browser game for the second Pokémon movie. The whole project was handled by Cyberworld, a company that used to deal with interactive media on browsers. When one of the most known YouTube channels about video games and trivia, Did You Know Gaming, reached one of the people who worked on the project, the response they got was positive.
For the past 20 years, the whole project was thought to have vanished due to Nintendo’s heavy restrictions on unauthorized games and media of their franchises. We can still see this happening with Nintendo sending cease and desist cases to some creators, one of them recently tied to a project about bringing the Dolphin Emulator to Steam. The hopes of bringing the top GameCube emulator to Steam were certainly short-lived.
Although this project was commissioned by Warner Bros. to promote the upcoming movie at the time, the creation ended up feeling like a complete game. Nintendo scanned through the website and decided it was not suitable in terms of being a promo and ordered it to be taken down. The game plays like a first-person adventure game through a Pokémon trainer’s point of view, who gets to choose their team and go through a small story, and obviously use certain Pokémons to fight with other trainers. Therefore, as expected, Nintendo’s involvement was quite imminent after learning it played like DOOM but with Pokémon.
Did You Know Gaming found out about the lost project while interviewing one of the employees of the Cyberworld back in the day. All of the assets and working copy of the game have been dumped to archive.org, and it is free to check, just watch for people who are wearing “Totally Not Nintendo” while taking a look at it.
