Did You Know Gaming? has come a good distance. As soon as a weblog filled with Fb-tier picture macros about questionable videogame trivia, now it is a YouTube empire with a give attention to videogame historical past and preservation. DYKG’s newest undertaking concerned the resurrection of a misplaced Pokémon browser sport known as Pokémon 2000 Journey, which has now been uploaded to the Web Archive.
Initially created as a tie-in for the second Pokémon film, Pokémon 2000 Journey was the work of Cyberworld, an organization making browser-based 3D environments as promotional instruments—letting customers wander round in first-person recreations of scenes from motion pictures, comics, and so forth. Employed by Warner Bros. to assist market Pokémon: The Film 2000, Cyberworld went above and past, making a fondly remembered although short-lived sport the place you selected from three groups of Pokémon with totally different skills you might use to unravel puzzles throughout three explorable islands.
With its 3D world populated with 2D sprites, Pokémon 2000 Journey resembled late-90s shooters. It was an actual and precise videogame, and that turned out to be its downfall. After racking up round one million downloads over the course of a month, it was shut down by Nintendo.
As Eddie Ruminski, a programmer at Cyberworld who labored on Pokémon 2000 Journey, defined in DYKG’s video, “Nintendo freaked they usually instantly hit us with a stop and desist.” Having anticipated a modest interactive webtour quite than a videogame, Nintendo was involved about model confusion between Cyberworld’s creation and the official product. “It was the best praise,” Ruminski mentioned. “By way of stop and desist, saying, ‘Sorry, what you made was an excessive amount of like a great videogame.'”
Because of Ruminski offering the recordsdata and archivists rufus10 and DoomTay getting them working, Pokémon 2000 Journey is playable once more right now. You may obtain it from the Web Archive in a bundle that additionally contains design docs and storyboards, in addition to the uncooked recordsdata and demos of different Cyberworld video games. Should you performed it on the time, I think about firing up Pokémon 2000 Journey right now will probably be a potent hit of nostalgia—a Proustian rush solely with Moltres and Articuno as a substitute of madeleine cake.
Although not one of the monster trainers on PC have taken off in fairly the identical manner as Pokémon, the sequence has discovered a house on our platform of alternative because of emulation and randomizers, which add to their replayability, after which there’s the entire historical past of bizarre bootleg Pokemon video games on PC.
