The Pokemon games were among the first that I ever played. Back then I wasn't interested enough to read magazines and I didn't have many friends who followed gaming. But good Lord, they marketed the hell out of that game. Between ads for the game itself and the anime, my brothers and I were already obsessed before the morning when we opened up that box and saw a translucent Game Boy Pocket with a copy of Pokemon Blue version inside the cartridge slot, and promptly flipped out.
Despite the marketing however, my brothers and I never really watched the show or got into the trading card games that much. We saw the first two movies (and loved them to bits) but beyond that, the majority of my experience with the series comes from the “regular” series of handheld titles: R/B/Y, G/S/C, R/S/E, and P/D/P. Many of my friends played for the pleasure of winning and becoming the new champion, but I played for something else. To explore the strange new world were kids left their home at 10-years-old to traverse around the world, meeting new people, catching new Pokemon and achieve something extraordinary (And maybe save the world while they’re at it, too.)
