Game Boy Color Body Paint Event (lost video of promotional event for Nintendo portable console; 1999)

This article has been tagged as NSFW due to its risqué subject matter.

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A screenshot of an old Gameinformer magazine showing photos of the event.

Status: Lost

The Game Boy Color is an 8-bit handheld console, made by Nintendo. The Color served as an upgrade to the original Game Boy and the fourth best-selling system of all time. While the console is remembered well by its audience, there exists a forgotten event where Nintendo painted college students' swimsuit-clad bodies to advertise the Game Boy Color.

Background

In March 1999, video game news articles started reporting on an event Nintendo was doing for the Game Boy Color. This event was an all-day beach event with music and GBC prizes. However, the event was mostly infamous for college students having their body painted in colors of the new GBC units. The event was mostly described by these news articles as strange like the honey-dipping event they did for the launch of Banjo-Kazooie.

The event was recorded and broadcasted on the web via RealPlayer G2 by web broadcasting company MediaOnDemand's InternetBroadcast.com service. This video was also broadcasted a month before Slamfest '99, a promotional event for the release of Super Smash Bros. was livestreamed.

Availability

The GBC Body Paint Event languished into obscurity for decades after its broadcast and initial talk by news articles and magazines.

This event will be brought up again in 2023 on the site, lemmy.world, when user Bozo talks about their research on the event and finding photos of the event from an old Gameinformer magazine. They also reveal that a link will take you to a Newstream article and clicking on a non-archived image will allow you to download a .ram file. the file isn't the video but rather metadata that directs RealPlayer to stream the video from the URL contained within it. Unfortunately, their trail went cold as the Wayback Machine did not have anything including the video from that subdomain archived.

As of 2024, despite being referenced numerous times, the video from the event has never resurfaced online and is unlikely to do so.

External Link

• Lenny World post on the event and research