maxrevive:

Hello! My name is Ashley, and Pokémon has been a huge part of my life for 12 years now. As such, talking about it comes like second nature to me, so I’ll be contributing some of my thoughts to Max Revive! To start off, though, I thought it might be nice to introduce myself with an origin story.

It’s weird to look back on how it all started, because I first learned about Pokémon entirely by chance. I mostly experienced new games based on what was on the shelves at the local rental store, which didn’t carry handheld titles. Videogames weren’t ever considered very cool among my peers, and my mother, the only other gamer in my family, had mostly given them up a few years prior. I was pretty shut off from any game-related news because we didn’t have the internet and game magazines were very hard to come by until the mid 90s.

Naturally, I got extremely excited when I started seeing stuff like Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro at our local grocery store. I bought a bunch of them and read them so much that most of the pages are still committed to my memory.

In one of these magazines was a preview for the Japanese Pokémon Red/Green. It was just a small blurb explaining what the game was all about and why Japan was going nuts for it. Nothing huge. I remember really liking the idea of caring for monsters but mainly I just glossed it over to get to the part about Donkey Kong Country 2 and other games I already cared about. Still, this small event was the starting point of it all.

Three years passed. I was watching my not-so-usual morning cartoon block before school when a new show called Pokémon unceremoniously appeared at 6:30 AM. It didn’t take long for me to become completely enamored by it. It got to the point where I, the girl who would normally find any excuse to sleep in, started getting up extra early every day just so I wouldn’t miss a new one.

I fell in love with the Pokémon world, Ash and his friends, and all the creatures they encountered. I learned the Pokérap, cried when Butterfree left, and even had a phase where I had a Pokémon for an imaginary friend (if I recall correctly, it was a Bulbasaur). But I didn’t make the connection between all of that and those games I had read about years ago until I started to see TV commercials for Red and Blue.

I had forgotten about the extremely short time period in which everything Pokémon came to America until I started researching it for this article, but man were they throwing us EVERYTHING at the same time. The show premiered in September, the games would come in October, the trading card game, toys and Pokémon Pikachu in November… but I like to think that Pokémon meant a lot more to me than than the total media saturation going on at the time. I was a lonely kid who daydreamed about having Pokémon adventures. Watching the show left me with this nice, fuzzy feeling I can’t quite explain. It’s how I started off every day, and it made them all the more better for it.

And now they were telling me that I could be a Pokémon Master for real?! Owning a copy of both Red and Blue suddenly became the most important thing in my life. I had about a month to make my wants known, as my birthday conveniently fell around the same time. I was both the most annoying and the best behaved little girl for those three weeks.

It all paid off exactly three days after my 13th birthday, and 12 days after the games had been released. The sun was shining. The car ride lasted for an eternity. Actually, it was probably more around an hour or so, but the wait was excruciating. Then we popped into Toys ‘R Us, and I got my two new shiny games from behind the glass. I was ecstatic… even though I had left my Game Boy at home!

This part was actually the biggest catalyst to my obsession. I’ve always had a love of reading back covers and game manuals, but the time I spent with Pokémon’s manuals on the car ride home was by far the best. It was amazing what Nintendo managed to cram into that standard-sized Game Boy booklet. It was a miniature guide to the game that led the reader all the way through to the first Gym Leader fight with Brock. It included a map of Kanto, an element chart, and tips out the wazoo.

This manual did a great job of explaining the world of Pokémon, but more importantly, it got me *even more* pumped to collect all 150 critters. In the very back of the manual was a bestiary; any Pokémon mentioned throughout the guide (which were mostly things I’d already seen on the show, like Pidgeys and Ratatas) had their pictures and names filled in.

But the majority of those pages were comprised of blank squares. The thing was not really practical for use, as it wasn’t a simple checklist you could just mark off as you progressed. Looking back on it, I’m convinced that part of the manual was just another hype tactic, and boy did it ever work. I wanted to know what secrets those empty boxes held. I had to catch ‘em all.

So when I got home, all of this built up Pokémon-related desire EXPLODED and I ended up playing Red/Blue for the next five years.

What about you? How did your fascination with Pokémon begin?