Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Hey You, Pikachu! tried to make players talk to a Pokemon out loud years before voice assistants were a normal part of anyone's living room. Developed by Ambrella and published by Nintendo, it released in Japan in December 1998 and reached North America in November 2000, the exact year stamped in this commercial, bundled with a Nintendo 64 accessory called the Voice Recognition Unit, built by NEC. The whole kit included a gray microphone box that plugged into the console's fourth controller port along with a mic, a mounting strap, and a yellow foam cover, and it remains the only Nintendo 64 game ever released in North America to use that accessory.
You play someone helping Professor Oak test a new invention called the PokéHelper, which lets you actually talk to Pokemon, starting with a wild Pikachu you befriend in Viridian Forest. The Voice Recognition Unit could understand around two hundred words, including specific move names like Thunder, Thunderbolt and ThunderShock, and Pikachu was voiced by Ikue Otani, the same actress behind the character in the anime, which became one of the few things critics consistently praised about the game.
A persistent urban legend claims saying PlayStation or Sony into the mic would make Pikachu angry, but that has been thoroughly debunked, since neither word ever shows up in the game's actual recognized vocabulary, most likely just misfiring speech recognition that got blamed on a fake trigger phrase. Calling Pikachu an electric rat, on the other hand, really will set it off, since that reaction is genuinely built into the game.
Let me know in the comments if you ever actually owned the microphone for this one. Subscribe to Game Forest GF for retro gaming content every single day.
#heyyoupikachu #pikachu #pokemon #nintendo64 #n64 #retrogaming #classicgaming #2000scommercial #retrocommercials #pokemongames #oldschoolgaming #vintagegaming #gaminghistory #2000snostalgia #n64classic #youtubeshorts #gaming
Hey You, Pikachu! tried to make players talk to a Pokemon out loud years before voice assistants were a normal part of anyone's living room. Developed by Ambrella and published by Nintendo, it released in Japan in December 1998 and reached North America in November 2000, the exact year stamped in this commercial, bundled with a Nintendo 64 accessory called the Voice Recognition Unit, built by NEC. The whole kit included a gray microphone box that plugged into the console's fourth controller port along with a mic, a mounting strap, and a yellow foam cover, and it remains the only Nintendo 64 game ever released in North America to use that accessory.
You play someone helping Professor Oak test a new invention called the PokéHelper, which lets you actually talk to Pokemon, starting with a wild Pikachu you befriend in Viridian Forest. The Voice Recognition Unit could understand around two hundred words, including specific move names like Thunder, Thunderbolt and ThunderShock, and Pikachu was voiced by Ikue Otani, the same actress behind the character in the anime, which became one of the few things critics consistently praised about the game.
A persistent urban legend claims saying PlayStation or Sony into the mic would make Pikachu angry, but that has been thoroughly debunked, since neither word ever shows up in the game's actual recognized vocabulary, most likely just misfiring speech recognition that got blamed on a fake trigger phrase. Calling Pikachu an electric rat, on the other hand, really will set it off, since that reaction is genuinely built into the game.
Let me know in the comments if you ever actually owned the microphone for this one. Subscribe to Game Forest GF for retro gaming content every single day.
#heyyoupikachu #pikachu #pokemon #nintendo64 #n64 #retrogaming #classicgaming #2000scommercial #retrocommercials #pokemongames #oldschoolgaming #vintagegaming #gaminghistory #2000snostalgia #n64classic #youtubeshorts #gaming
