If you're more into Bulbasaur or Squirtle, you are dumb. If you're on the Charmander train, we're instant buddies, bonded over a fake animal. If you're a fan, my selection likely meant something to you. This seemingly innocuous selection almost instantly taught me a lesson about Pokémon: Its players are territorial. Though I didn't know it at the time, just as a silly '80s film had inspired me, so had fire. I had three choices, none of which made any sense to me. My second consequential choice was to select my companion. Thus christened, Chainsa entered the world with his Pokémon Trainer's license to become master of the pocket monster. This creates something of a problem in Pokémon Blue, which only allows seven-character names. (I was, like, 8, and I didn't get to the movies that often, OK?) From that day on, in every game that gave me the opportunity, I named myself Chainsaw after the coolest guy in the movie, a slacker movie buff with a good heart nobody ever called by his real name, Francis. That fact, I reasoned, made me about the coolest kid I knew. I saw Summer School, the high school comedy starring Mark Harmon and Kirstie Alley, in a theater in the summer of 1987. It was also my first reminder that I was doing something very old. My mission was under way.įirst up: my in-game name. With a fresh pair of AAA batteries, I turned my new old handheld on, watched the Nintendo logo cascade down from the top of the screen and heard the indelible Game Boy chime. Within a few days, and for less than the cost of a retail console game, I had a beautiful red Game Boy Pocket and a copy of Pokémon Blue. It's not difficult or expensive to go retro. I decided early in this adventure that if I was going to play Pokémon for the first time, I was going to do it as authentically as possible, and that meant between my hands. That experience is my only context with the brand. I on the other hand thought that Pokémon was Digimon, and I was dumbfounded when we went to see the movie. At one point in 1999, a friend of mine was into the cartoon in the life-consuming obsessive way that only a child or an upper-middle-class 40-year-old man can be. I understood in the vaguest sense that Pokémon was a role-playing game about catching and fighting monsters. The first thing you need to know is what I knew going in, and that was about as close to nothing as possible. Join me as I trip backside-first and nearly 20 years late into Pokémon Blue. Now, almost two decades late, I've decided to fix my mistake. Point is, in the mid-to-late-'90s, while I was putting all my eggs in the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation baskets, I missed a wildly successful game (or pair of games). Another weirdish thing about me: If I miss the first stop on the hype train, I have trouble hopping on board down the line. I missed a handful of popular games during that break. I didn't get back into handheld gaming until 2003, when The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker persuaded me to buy a clamshell Game Boy Advance, which became a Tingle Tuner when I connected it to my GameCube. I guess I grew up or found other distractions. The living room, my bedroom, the back of the family's green Ford minivan headed to Myrtle Beach - where I went, the Game Boy went, too.Īnd then, suddenly and without much fanfare, we parted ways. Days could disappear while I played pea green Tetris and Super Mario Land and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan. In the early '90s, my Game Boy and I were inseparable.
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