Lost Pokémon 2000 Adventure Game Rediscovered

Last Updated on October 7, 2023

Pokémon 2000 Adventure was a Flash browser game thought lost to time and old devices.

You catch some and you lose some, but sometimes they return in the best ways. Although, I’m not talking about Pokémon themselves, I am referring to Pokémon games! A Pokémon game that was previously lost to time since 2012 has now been made available to play thanks to the work of preservation and gaming enthusiasts.

Pokémon 2000 Adventure, the title that was intended to release in correspondence to the second Pokémon movie Pokémon the Movie 2000, is now available for download along with the soundtrack, concept art and storyboards. This was made possible by DidYouKnowGaming who archived the files online.

Warner Bros., who were given permission from Nintendo to create officially licensed products for the movie, outsourced the game project to Cyberworld to create a game using their QBORG engine after their positive reception of their Harry Potter-based browser game (as explained in DYKG’s video below.)

Here’s what we know about Pokémon 2000 Adventure. It takes the anime versions of the Pokémon and gives them the 2D sprite in a 2.5D environment treatment. To detail its success when it first launched, Cyberworld employee, Eddie Ruminski, mentioned that the game “had about a million downloads in the span of a month”. This caused Nintendo to become concerned and they issued cease and desist due to the suspicion that “Warner Brothers breached the contract — they exceeded the contract’s allowable scope”, said Ruminski. Nintendo were not expecting the game to take off like it did and was hoping for a smaller project to coincide with the movie.

Before the release of this title, there were only 2 other 3D Pokémon games released for western audiences (which included Pokémon Snap and Pokémon Stadium). This meant that 2000 Adventure may have caused fans to think this was a new change for the series as a whole.

The game is only a ten-minute playthrough, but it boasts three Pokémon teams and three different difficulties so you can be sure you’ll get multiple runs out of it if you decide to give it a try.