Pokémon: The Movie 2000 Adventure (found browser-based online game; 2000)

Front page of the game.

Status: Found

Date found: 17 Sep 2023

Found by: Various users

Pokémon: The Movie 2000 Adventure was an online game developed by Cyberworld International Corporation as a tie-in to Pokémon: The Movie 2000. It utilized Cyberworld's proprietary QBORG technology to display 2.5D environments in a specialized browser. According to Neil Marshall, who served as a programmer and technical director for the project, the game was only available for a month before being pulled due to "a contract dispute".^[1] However, at least one file existed as late as 2003,^[2] and the front page of the game existed as late as 2009 according to Wayback Machine,^[3] whereas a 4chan post implies it was around as late as 2011,^[4] and Wayback's crawls of the site itself go as late as early 2012.^[5]

Gameplay

The beginning of the game has the player set their name, choose a Pokémon team, and select difficulty. The player navigates a 2.5D environment, with web pages displayed on a side panel allowing for further interaction with the game world. The goal of the game was to travel to three islands, each guarded by one of the three legendary bird Pokémon, Moltres, Zapdos, and Articuno, and retrieve an Ancient Sphere from each island.

Each island involves multiple levels and barriers that the player overcomes using their Pokémon team. There are also other Pokémon scattered throughout to learn about as well as Poké Balls that have a chance of either levelling up a Pokémon or resulting in a random Pokémon from their team being stolen by Team Rocket. At the end of the island, there is a shrine where the player gets an Ancient Sphere from by answering trivia questions. There is also a question mark at each island that shows a silhouette, and the player is to guess the Pokémon shown in the silhouette. Once all three spheres are obtained, the player is treated to a celebration held at Articuno's island, and they are able to view a "certificate" showing their name and score.^[6]

Takedown

Nintendo initially approved Cyberworld developing a Pokémon game under the assumption that it would be something simple.^[6] When they became aware that Cyberworld was developing a 3D Pokémon game -- roughly a year after Pokémon Snap and Stadium came out in the US -- they ordered the game to be taken down, four weeks after it was initially launched. The link to the game was removed, though the game itself technically remained online for a few more years

Availability

Warner Bros. has since shuttered the domain the game resided on. Between archives of it and of the older domain www.p2kthemovie.com, all that is left of the game are some HTML and supplementary files, shortcut files used to display said HTML in the browser, some sprites, and seven levels.

When the game was still up, visiting levels would download map assets and sprites to the user's computer and those downloaded assets would likely still exist if the computer has not been wiped or replaced or the browser uninstalled since then.

LMW user DoomTay has also contacted Marshall about obtaining a more complete copy of the game, but he has replied stating that he did not keep a copy because the browser "wouldn't run past a specific date (or it was tied to an old version of Internet Explorer and wouldn't work anymore)" In actuality, the browser has been found to work in Windows 10 with little issue, apart from a minor visual glitch rectified by resizing the window.

On May 16th, 2023, Cody Burns of EveryGameEver released a video featuring an interview with Marshall and developer Eddie Ruminski, where they shed some light on the game's development and downfall, as well as provided a recording of a playthrough of a much more complete version of the game from a CD Eddie had containing the game's files. Later the team at DidYouKnowGaming was sent said assets from Eddie himself. The game was then restored by users rufus10 and DoomTay. They then uploaded the working game to the Internet Archive on September 17th, 2023.^[7]