A lost first-person Pokémon browser game has been found and restored

pcgamer.com:

Did You Know Gaming? has come a long way. Once a blog full of Facebook-tier image macros about questionable videogame trivia, now it's a YouTube empire with a focus on videogame history and preservation. DYKG's latest project involved the resurrection of a lost Pokémon browser game called Pokémon 2000 Adventure, which has now been uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Originally created as a tie-in for the second Pokémon movie, Pokémon 2000 Adventure was the work of Cyberworld, a company making browser-based 3D environments as promotional tools—letting users wander around in first-person recreations of scenes from movies, comics, and so on. Hired by Warner Bros. to help market Pokémon: The Movie 2000, Cyberworld went above and beyond, making a fondly remembered though short-lived game where you chose from three teams of Pokémon with different abilities you could use to solve puzzles across three explorable islands.

With its 3D world populated with 2D sprites, Pokémon 2000 Adventure resembled late-90s shooters. It was a real and actual videogame, and that turned out to be its downfall. After racking up around a million downloads over the course of a month, it was shut down by Nintendo.

As Eddie Ruminski, a programmer at Cyberworld who worked on Pokémon 2000 Adventure, explained in DYKG's video, «Nintendo freaked and they immediately hit us with a cease and desist.» Having expected a modest interactive webtour rather than a videogame, Nintendo was concerned about brand confusion between Cyberworld's creation and the official product. «It was the greatest compliment,» Ruminski said. «Via cease and desist, saying, 'Sorry, what you made was too much like a good videogame.'»

Thanks to Ruminski providing the files and archivists