Lost Media: Pokémon Fever (1999) VHS Tape

Earlier in the year I started getting obsessed with the idea of preserving old VHS recordings and bought myself a fancy TBC VCR, and just last week I was given the opportunity I was preparing for.

Some months ago I had posted on Discord (a local/Philadelphia server) that I was looking for old VHS tapes, VCRs, and CRT TVs, and it spawned a conversation that kept the thread periodically resurfacing.

Eventually, about two weeks ago I got tagged by a user (Jac) in that thread with the following message:

I have some Shirley Temple ones you can have, and the MST3K shorts if you want to digitize.

I also have a video of me and others playing Pokemon Yellow that Nintendo filmed, I think they may have used it for promo vids at Toys R Us. I would love it digitized. I suspect it will be new to the Internet.

-Jac

Some fairly common tapes, and oh and by the way, a rare obscure Pokémon tape that may in fact be lost.

I spoke with Jac to learn more about the tape and he shared the story of how he and his sister were invited to come play Pokémon Yellow at Nintendo of America in Washington (where they lived at the time) and were filmed as part of a promotion. Jac mentioned he’s had the tape sitting in storage for years and hadn’t seen what was on it since he was a kid. He was excited to see what was on it, and I was excited to be the one to show him.

You are a Nintendo Star in “POKéMON Fever”

May 7th, 1999, Jac and his sister attend a private event at Nintendo of America in Redmond, Washington to play Pokémon Yellow. Pokémon Yellow would go on to release in the US on October 18, 1999. If you had been in a Toys R Us around this time, you may have seen this footage before.

The version on the Internet Archive was produced in collaboration with Garrett Gilchrist, who helped me with the restoration. The final capture uploaded here was first captured by a DVD recorder from a TBC VCR. After capturing, Garrett deinterlaced the footage, removed noise from the audio, and averaged multiple captures to reduce compression artifacts and visual noise.

Source	Link	Archival Version
YouTube	View	v.2 (Youtube version)
Internet Archive	Link	v.2
Torrent	Magnet 🧲	v.2

An interview with Jac.

I asked Jac a few questions to help document what we know about the tape.

1. How did you get involved with the recording?

My father’s friend worked at Nintendo Of America in Redmond. They had some kind of call for kids, and me being a Nintendo freak, totally wanted to go.

2. How old were you?

14, you can definitely tell I’m older than everyone else there, they didn’t have me on screen much!

3. Why were you at Nintendo of America that day?

To play Pokemon Yellow

4. Who were the other kids involved?

Children of employees as far as I know.

5. What can you remember from that day?

We were all brought into a room, they gave us the Game Boys and just told us to play, and that they would film. They split us into groups of 2 or 3, and asked us to try to be fair switching off.

At one point I remember being able to pull the game out and take a look at the cartridge, I remember it being clear, with no label, and the top part that stuck out had no plastic and some dip switches or something. I assume they were debug versions or something.

6. I assume you didn’t play with the switches?

I did not

7. How long were you able to play the game freely before filming?

We were being filmed the entire time after being given the games.

8. Do you know anything about what this tape was used for? For example, did it ever air on TV or was it possibly played in retail stores?

We found it once at a Toys ‘R’ Us at the end-cap where you could press the icon and it would show you a preview of the game. We checked other places like KB Toys but it was never in their system.

9. Was the tape mailed to you after the recording, or how did you ultimately obtain it?

I don’t recall if it was mailed or if my dad’s friend gave it to us.

Where was this tape released?

The “POKéMON Fever” term used in the tape title is something I believe was coined up by the marketing teams behind Pokémon. The term was used in everything from news segments, press releases, and a memorable kids wb promo. To discover what this tape was ultimately used for, I did a little digging with Jac to pair what he could remember with what we could find online. Since publishing this article, we received a tip from a user on Facebook that this footage was actually shown at E3 1999.

Toys R Us

Jac mentioned he had seen his tape playing in an end cap at Toys R Us. After we both did a little digging, Jac sends me a screenshot and tells me:

That thing, that’s what it was in You hit the little icon in the red part and the video played

Here it is, this is the exact end cap that contained the footage of Jac and his sister playing Pokémon Yellow.

Though it’s hard to tell, the commentary of the video seems to suggest this is a Toys R Us. The reporter mentions “Toys R Us had the largest shipment available to public, and before noon they were sold out.”, before cutting to what appears to maybe a manager or other tie-wearing employee. In another shot you can see an employee in the old red Toys R Us shirt.

Now, this video was in 1996, before the production of the tape we are looking at today, but if we look closely at this footage, we can see a similar tape for the N64 release that has the same style of title card.

These “World Of Nintendo” kiosks it seem were updated with new games and displays every so often. Similar displays were used at least as far back is 1992 for the SNES and Gameboy.

I’d really like to know more about how the red button system worked. The tape given to Jac is under 4 and half minutes long, though it does include a few different segments. For the Kiosk to be able to play a segment on demand at the press of a button, it’s probably more likely they were using DVDs which were still relatively new, or possibly just purely digital files on a PC. I’d really love to know more about exactly how this footage was played back. The VHS tape was likely not something that was used outside of keepsakes for the people who were filmed.

E3 1999

E3, most readers of this post will remember, was an annual trade show for the video game industry. It ran strong from 1995 until 2019. By 2019 several of the largest console manufacturers had left to run their own dedicated events. The expo was put on hiatus due to the COVI-19 pandemic and had one final virtual-only event in 2021. A sad end to a long-standing tradition in the gaming community.

After sharing this article a few places online, someone on Facebook pointed out they had seen the footage before in another video currently available on YouTube. From the crowd at a very early 1999 E3, we can see on the big screen behind the stage, the same footage from Jac’s tape. This footage itself was lost until recently.

What’s next?

This is the first bit of truly “valuable” lost media I have gotten my hands on to digitize and I’ve gotten some tips and pointers from pros on how to properly preserve this tape. So while we have a really high quality capture, I’m going to continue to work on getting even better captures. I recently learned about RF capture and how we can use the RF output of a VCR to get the RAW signal from the tape, to be processed later digitally.

Think you have some lost media people would like to see preserved? I’d be happy to help! Contact me and let’s see what we can do.