Museums of Failure (II): Pokemon-Mini.net

A YouTube video on the Did You Know Gaming channel caught my attention today:

What caught my eye was not the topic itself (the Pokémon Mini system) but the way it was presented: as “Nintendo’s failed console” (and here I thought that title was exclusively used for my beloved Virtual Boy!). Once again, failure is used as the reason to talk about old gaming artifacts — and this made me remember that this small and weird system has its own museum of failure.

But first, let’s take a look at how it is presented in the video.

Advertised as a major Pokémon announcement […] the console wasn’t as big a success considering it carried the Pokémon name. Marketing was practically non-existent for the system and it came out the same year as the Game Boy Advance. Despite some of its technical prowess it couldn’t compete with the GBA’s capabilities and was seen as more of a toy than a gaming system. The Pokémon Mini could be found stocked in stores for roughly a year factoring in all markets.

Firstly, the system is considered to be important because it’s linked to Nintendo and the Pokémon brand, and it was supposed to be big. Unmet expectations, I have seen in this project, are a big part of the push to preserve failed artifacts*. Secondly, it’s considered to have very particular traits that make it unique and worthwhile: it’s the smallest cartridge-based system and it had “technical prowess”. Its value is not only derived from being part of Nintendo’s and Pokémon’s history, but also it’s implied that it deserved better.

This might be the reasoning behing Pokemon-Mini.net, a website dedicated to this console.

Founded in 2004, the site has its origin in the demoscene. The system was hacked then and later a demo called SHizZLE, by Team Pokémé, was released at the German demoscene party Breakpoint in 2005. With this, the Pokémon Mini was resurrected as “active hardware” with ongoing (non-commercial) development.

Pokemon-Mini.net has all the features of the kind of “museums of failure” we are studying in this project, as we can see in its introduction:

Welcome to Pokémon-Mini.net, your one stop Pokémon Mini source! This site aims to be a complete resource for everything Pokémon Mini, from coverage of games and hardware to hacking and homebrew. This is also the new home of Team Pokémé. Please enjoy your stay and consider joining our community.

Information on the hardware and the software, a database with all the games, including a section on unreleased ones, a marketplace, scans of the instruction manuals, English fan translations of games officially released only in Japanese, emulators, tools for development, a homebrew section, guides to use flash carts, news, and a big and active community (as of this writing, it has 269 members and 2659 posts in a total of 1083 topics).

In our project, we research not failed artifacts but the communities and movements around them, especially in their efforts to preserve them. So far we have focused on four main types of failures: commercial (“flops”), critical (“bad games”), unreleased games, and unlicensed games. Well, this has a bit (a lot, actually) of everything. The Pokémon Mini, and Pokemon-Mini.net, very much deserve our attention. I hope we can properly study them as this project moves on.

*Funnily enough, there’s no actual data on how bad the system actually failed. This is what Pokemon-Mini.net says in the description of the console (emphasis mine):

The Pokémon Mini was first released in 2001. It’s centered around the Pokémon franchise. Apparently it was no commercial success because it was canceled soon after its release.

The lack of data is highlighted again in a forum post:

This makes the long-running dedication of this community all the more impressive. 15 years preserving a failed console with no measure of its actual failure!