Before anyone asks - yes, this actually happened and was officially sanctioned by Nintendo of America. As far as I know, I’m the only person on the internet who is actively aware of this existing outside of a few others in a lost media Discord channel where I originally shared this discovery.
For context, I’m one of the search team members from the Lost Media Wiki who’s been on the hunt for video footage of Super Smash Bros. Slamfest '99 over the past couple years. Slamfest '99 was notable for being livestreamed over the web via RealPlayer, a relative novelty for marketing in 1999. While the Slamfest '99 broadcast remains lost, our efforts to find any trace of information on it has led us deep into the Wayback Machine and old physical gaming media.
Upon browsing through an old GameInformer magazine from May 1999, I stumbled across this on page 32 (light NSFW). It wasn’t uncommon for marketing stunts from the 90’s to have an edgy or risque element to them, so I didn’t think much of it at first glance. Most old promo events are completely forgotten/lost anyways due to there not being any associated media collateral produced from them. But upon closer inspection, it turns out this Nintendo body painting event was recorded and broadcast via RealPlayer too about a month before Slamfest.
My interest was piqued, knowing that modern Nintendo would never greenlight a promo event like this again in a million years and would probably like to forget this even happened. The fact that there was indeed lost media involved was incentive enough to start digging for traces of this alongside Slamfest. I imagine some Youtubers or podcasters would have a field day with how bizarre something like this was for an official Nintendo-sanctioned event.
The link in the GameInformer article takes you to a webpage on newstream.com. The Wayback Machine has archived the page - it reads:
Do It In Color This Spring Break
(MARCH-1999) – Grab your shades, your towel and your paint! Paint? Nintendo is painting college students’ swimsuit-clad bodies during Spring Break to celebrate the vibrant new Game Boy Color, the world’s number one selling portable video game system in color.
Picture this…hundreds of crazy, bathing suit-wearing, party-ready college kids getting their bodies painted with the new Game Boy colors: Kiwi, Dandelion, Teal and Berry. This colorful event is a “bright” way for college students to enjoy their time away from school.
Game Boy Color, the latest addition to the world’s most popular video game system, is a portable game machine with a full-color screen and improved graphics processor for a completely new interactive entertainment experience on-the-go. Adding to its already colorful disposition are four new color casings: “Berry” (magenta); “Kiwi” (lime); “Dandelion” (yellow); “Teal” (blue).
Clicking the non-archived image next to the title allows you to download a .ram file. This type of file is not the video itself, rather metadata that directs RealPlayer to stream the video from the URL contained within it. Unlike in Slamfest’s case, this .ram file was archived by the Wayback Machine, and we can see where it would have streamed the video from:
pnm://medialinkrm.internetbroadcast.com/medialink/99-100_vid.rm?title="New Game Boy Color"
The trail unfortunately goes cold there, as the Wayback Machine doesn’t have anything from that subdomain archived. It’s worth noting that the Slamfest broadcast was hosted on the media.internetbroadcast.com subdomain, implying that Nintendo had an ongoing business relationship with MediaOnDemand (internetbroadcast’s parent company).
I leveraged the same third party Wayback Machine tools from the Slamfest search to see if I could unearth any archived mentions of the event in the broader gaming news sphere. While I’m sure there are many more out there, Here’s all the references to the GBC body painting event I could dig up:
Nintendorks.com Daily Reader Comments 3/18/99
Gaming-Age.com headline 3/18/99
Gaming-Age.com article 3/18/99
Nintendo World Report 3/19/99 - (the only reference to this event which is still live on the web afaik - originally hosted on PlanetN2000.com)
DMGice.com - (under March 5th and 17th dates)
GBstation.com- (under March 5th and 17th dates)
Despite all these places mentioning the event, the video itself remains lost - all these mentions refer back to the Newstream post.
So there you have it, likely the weirdest promotion that Nintendo’s ever done, and I’m sharing this knowledge with you all as a Lemmy.world exclusive. This is pretty much everything we know about this obscure footnote in Nintendo history. Hopefully you found this interesting or at least got a healthy dose of nostalgia from those old linked websites.
If you remember anything about this event or Slamfest '99, I’d be thrilled to hear from you in the comments here or via DM.
No, I’ve been focused on the Slamfest search, and no one else is actively looking for this as far as I know.