What was Pokémon Dream World?

The Pokémon Dream World was a game played in a web browser, on the Pokémon Global Link website, tethered to Black, White, Black 2 and White 2. Bulbapedia calls it a Generation V analog to the Pokéwalker, and the comparison is exact: where the walker took a Pokémon into your pocket, the Dream World took one into the internet. Using the C-Gear's Game Sync, unlocked by giving Fennel the Dream Mist from a Munna, you tucked a Pokémon in, and it appeared asleep on the Global Link, dreaming.

Inside the dream, sessions rationed to an hour a day, your Pokémon had a house you could decorate and a garden where berries grew, in a generation whose cartridges had given up berry farming. From the house you crossed to the Isle of Dreams, a chain of areas where wild Pokémon appeared for small games of skill. Befriend one and it waited for you in the Entralink forest back in Unova, catchable in a Dream Ball, and every single one carried its Hidden Ability, the Dream World's signature prize. Friends' houses could be visited and watered for, an early, gentle social game.

It launched in Japan on October 13, 2010, three weeks after the games it served, and internationally on April 12, 2011. The end was announced with unusual ceremony: new Global Link accounts stopped on October 1, 2013, tucking in new Pokémon stopped on December 10, 2013, and on January 14, 2014 the Dream World closed entirely, four months before the Wi-Fi shutdown that would have killed it anyway. Pokémon still asleep could be woken and brought home until May 20, 2014.

Nothing of it survives in playable form. The Dream World was a website, and when the website closed, a whole habitat of the DS era, its furniture, gardens and dream-only friendships, became the first major Pokémon world to vanish completely.