In 2002, apparently a game was released for PC featuring Hello Kitty, bizarrely, playing soccer with realistic human adults.
I don't think it counts as lost media, because it seems that it WAS released and sold, but I can find no videos of the actual gameplay available online.
On YouTube you can find a trailer for the game and its opening (which feature Sanrio characters and not the human players from the gameplay screenshots):
Apparently Hello Kitty is not the only character to appear in this game. Other Sanrio characters such as My Melody, Pochacco, Badtz-Maru and Minna No Tabo also appeared in the game as seen in a few screenshots from SanrioTown.
I saw those characters in the GamersHell screenshots that I linked to, but they were just on the sidelines as cheerleaders. Are the SanrioTown screenshots the same, and if not, can you link to them please?
I think this game has become lost media. There's zero video of gameplay footage to be found online, no way to obtain or play this game. It's so strange. I would question if it was even ever released, if it weren't for the photos of those raffle winners receiving their free copies.
Nice find! I myself shopped from Ruten before. I found some very rare Vocaloid trading figures from there. I did use a Taiwanese proxy and the fees/shipping were pricey. But it was worth it lol.
I have an update on this! Someone uploaded a video of gameplay on YouTube! youtu.be/YRs23WQ9eLc
It's just as strange as it appeared to be in the screenshots. It's hard to believe this was sold as an official Hello Kitty game. It really does look like just a generic football game with Hello Kitty pasted in as a playable character.
I decided to do some digging around and found out the game was hosted on various Chinese websites, however almost all of them had dead links. Some of those links were captured on the Wayback Machine, though all of them were corrupted.
It took awhile but eventually I found one working mirror of the Chinese version, which I cleaned it up a bit and uploaded it to the Internet Archive.
I decided to do some digging around and found out the game was hosted on various Chinese websites, however almost all of them had dead links. Some of those links were captured on the Wayback Machine, though all of them were corrupted.
It took awhile but eventually I found one working mirror of the Chinese version, which I cleaned it up a bit and uploaded it to the Internet Archive.