Thanks for the interesting read! It reminded me of the legend of the “Polybius” arcade game, which was also said to cause seizures and paranoia. The legend said it was created by the CIA to test sinister technology, and was surreptitiously placed in arcades by nameless Men In Black. I’m sure it has plenty of associated creepypastas…
Thank you for reading it, I'm glad you found it interesting. That being said... how interesting you mentioned Polybius. That's totally not something I've been researching recently...
I remember when the Pokemon craze swept through the little town I lived in at the time. It was a pretty distinct divide of the "normal" kids and us loser nerds who did stuff like play video games and D&D, read fantasy books, and watch anime. (I also remember when we called it "Japanimation" because that cringe was the term of the time.) A couple of my best friends already had the Cadillac-sized original Game-Boy when the games released, so each got a copy of Red and Blue respectively for their birthdays. I got in on it a bit later, after the Game-Boy Color released near the end of that year. Christmas rolled around and I'd gotten a lime green GBC, a stack of crazy attachments, (the screen magnifier with the build in light was great, the crappy joystick that clipped over the d-pad not so much) a copy of Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, and naturally, Pokemon Yellow.
Kids these days can call me a "Genwunner" all they want. They haven't, but they can, and I won't care. My time with the series lived and died in Gen I, both in terms of the video games, the show, and the TCG. They were fun for what they were, but the time in which this series came to establish a foothold in my life was one in which it would soon find itself competing against far better options.
Final Fantasy VII and Breath of Fire III held my attention in the JRPG world, followed a few short years later by the first Xenosaga on the PS2.
The Pokemon show was swiftly cast aside for the Toonami block once we moved out of the mountains and back to the city, where Cartoon Network was no longer sharing a channel with ESPN. Yes, weird as it sounds, Cartoon Network and ESPN shared the same channel in the town I grew up in, swapping over right at 4:00 PM, when Toonami was set to start. Suddenly, DBZ and the various animated superhero shows of the day were now open options for me, so Pokemon was soon cast aside.
And where the TCG is concerned, well, it's a bit of a surprising one. You might think, "Ah yes, it must've been Magic: The Gathering." You'd be right to assume I played it then, too, but I found MtG before the Pokemon TCG, and my core friend group played Pokemon more. However, our interest in that game was ultimately pretty short lived considering that, largely because of my best friend's stepdad, each of us had a massive collection of cards for the WildStorm Comics TCG that was, at the time, put out by Image. The game primarily featured characters and goons from the WildCats comic series, but also featured the likes of Savage Dragon and Spawn, so you can imagine why a bunch of nerdy teenage boys like us would flock to that over Pokemon. This was to say nothing of the deeper strategy involved with that game's deck building. Believe me when I say that we would spend hours upon hours refining our decks whenever we threw our little tournaments with each other.
Still, though short-lived, Pokemon did have a pretty big impact in my youth. Big enough that even living in a tiny tourist town in the California mountains with a population of a scant couple thousand, half of whom were retirees, my friends and I all still heard about the Porygon episode. Funny how that works.
I also had a lime green GBC. Clearly, it's the color of choice for patricians of discerning taste, even though I didn't pick the color because it was originally a gift I didn't ask for, as was Pokemon Red. My dad actually bought them for me as a birthday gift as some sort of weird swipe at my mom because she didn't want me playing Pokemon, watching the show, etc. She had heard all the rumors about it being demonic and what not, but after watching a few episode of the anime with me she got over it pretty quick and became a Pokemon enabler for me. Believe it or not, Pokemon Red was my first video game, so it was my introduction to pretty much all "nerd" adjacent media. Really, my dad might as well have just handed me a crack pipe - it might have done less damage in the long run, but, here we are all the same...
I am guessing I'm a few years older than you (37) since my first game was Wolfenstein 3D on the family 386--in hindsight maybe it was not such a good idea to introduce a five year old to Nazis and World War II--and then Doom. So Pokemon didn't have much edge for me, but it certainly had more than the excessively cutesy later generations (I think the anime was a bad influence on the games--even when I was 12 I absolutely hated the anime and that gormless crybaby Ash Ketchum).
I think one aspect to the sense of danger in Gen I was that building a good team was very difficult without a guide and it was very easy to end up with a team (or just an overleveled starter) who would get steamrolled by Sabrina or Lance (I never beat Lance playing Yellow version back in the day--and no, I did not use Pikachu, his ass got shoved into a PC box and forgotten). In later generations, if you understand the type chart you can walk all over the bosses even without foreknowledge because of the abundance of strong Pokemon and moves of various types.
P.S. have you played any of the rom hacks? Some of them are properly hard though I generally find their attempts to explore mature themes rather farcical (DarkViolet has a scene where Team Rocket shoot Cubone'a mother--with guns!--in front of you and it just doesn't work at all). Unbound and Polished Crystal are probably the best of them.
Oh yeah and while we're on the subject of Game Boys, I remember in the early 2000s I got a black GBA with the Afterburner frontlight kit for Christmas and I was immensely proud of it, even though it was heavy, ate batteries like a Game Gear, and the screen was dimmer than the GBA SP that came out only a year later, because it was special and a GBA SP was not. I probably still have it somewhere.
For what it's worth, my dad let me watch him play games like Wolfenstein, Doom, and others when I was young. I'd sit in his lap and he'd let me use the disconnected joystick to think I was playing while he was using the keyboard, so... it could be worse.
That being said, the Pokemon anime did have a deleterious effect on the series as a whole; the original games and their immediate predecessors were largely divorced from the anime in a lot of ways, but as the anime took off into the stratosphere future installments would take more and more cues from it (i.e. Pokemon were never intended to only say their names, which is a frankly dumbass element introduced by the anime; they're basically animals, and were always supposed to make animal sounds). Gradually, as more and more of the original team moved into different positions or left entirely, they were replaced by newcomers who were heavily influenced by the anime. The direct result of this is the hokey, half-baked gimmicks added to every new Generation that seem like ideas ripped from a bad tokusatsu show. It's sad because the core gameplay loop is good enough to not need these poorly thought out and silly gimmicks ham-fistedly shoved in to sell toys or give the anime more to do.
There's also a lot to be said about how easy the games have become. I agree that the difficulty of Gen I makes it more of an appealing replay than the newer games, which, like I said in the article, hold your hand to the point that the game plays itself. In Gen V they introduced a "hard mode" - I've never understood why that doesn't make a return, but that would also take a modicum of effort, and GameFreak has proven that they clearly don't like exerting more than the bare minimum.
Lastly, I have played several ROM Hacks. There's something of a renaissance of them going on at present where actual good, solid games that aren't bogged down by excessive and puerile edginess that defines so many younger ones; some are more absurd than others, and there's still some stinkers, but a lot of the newer ones are just straight-forward, old-fashioned Pokemon games, no frills or fluff.
My personal favorite is Quarantine Crystal; Polished Crystal is good, but no other fangame has captured the feeling of going into the original two games for the first time quite like that one. The biggest problem is the creator, for reasons unknown to me, ditched a few of the coolest Pokemon created for it for his own personal gag Pokemon that suck, but I also think he had a mental breakdown and left the team so other people are finishing it now (since only the first half is complete). Still, I'd recommend it. It'll remind you what was so much fun about the originals.
I thought Unbound was actually pretty good with making some of the later generations' gimmicks suck less. It has Mega Evolutions, Z-Moves, and, in a few select battles, Dynamax, but it doesn't have Gigantomax or the one that makes a Ring Pop sprout of your Pokemon's forehead). It makes you go through a whole dungeon and fight a boss with a Mega Altaria to earn the right to use Mega Evolutions, and all of the later boss trainers have their own Megas. And on top of that, you have to hunt far and wide for Mega Stones, often having to battle special "Mega Trainers" who use the same Mega Stone that they give you when they are defeated (so to use Mega Alakazam, you have to beat a trainer with a Mega Alakazam, and he will probably beat you at least once. In Pokemon Y, Mega Charizard Y was a freebie that served as an I Win button for almost every battle in the entire game. In Unbound, Mega Charizard Y was a reward I had to work very hard for, revisiting an old dungeon and finding very remote secrets to get Charizite Y, and then spending $50,000 and abusing save states to get a Charmander egg from the Egg Lady in Magnolia Town (she will give you one of around 30 eggs at random), and then I had to grind 60 levels on that Charmander to catch it up with the rest of my team, and even then Mega Charizard Y was extremely powerful but far less invulnerable than in Pokemon Y--despite the fact that I used the late-game IV trainer and a very rare Gold Bottle Cap to max out all its IVs, an NPC unlocked by a sidequest to change its nature to Modest (in what was implied to be an extremely painful brain surgery that made Charizard hate me for a while), and used the Power Lens and Power Anklet items to EV train it, meaning I had about the most powerful Charizard possible. Then you can't even use Z-Moves until the postgame...but some late-game trainers can!
I also think Unbound in general makes a nice introduction to more "competitive" styles of Pokemon combat because of the late game options to optimize your team (though you won't be able to fully optimize all of them with the available resources) and because the game is really hard--not Radical Red hard (unless you play on Very Hard or Insane, the latter of which gives many boss trainers illegal Pokemon with too many EVs or early evolutions or the like for the true masochists) but much, much harder than the mainline games. Even "Vanilla" is no cakewalk and "Difficult", which I played on, was a real challenge, especially since the boss encounters scale to your level so their mons are always 2-4 levels higher than yours.
I couldn't even tell you what my first video game was because it was one of those horrible edutainment games run on the old HP computer my dad took from his office to make the family computer. It ran with Windows 3.1, back in the days of Chip's Challenge and Ski Free lol
Thanks for this nice little retrospective. I especially liked the paragraph about the abandoned power plant and the other eerie places of Kanto. Very evocative writing, and you honestly make it sound much more interesting that what's in the actual game(s). Especially since I have a bit of a soft spot for that kind of "abandoned industrial creepiness", for lack of a better term. See also the factory levels in Donkey Kong Country from the same time if you intentionally overthink them, once again helped by the atmospheric soundtrack.
Anyway, like The Man Behind the Screen above, I'm also a "genwunner" by default in that I've only played the first game pair of the series. By the time Pokemon became a phenomenon I was aging out of the target audience, but I did enjoy them as surprisingly involved and intricate JRPGs, especially on the very limited GameBoy. That system had better and more ambitious games than it had a right to, like these and Link's Awakening. In fact, I think the GB is intriguing in itself, in terms of how long-lived it was and also how laughably primitive it was. I remember very well how a portable system with color graphics seemed like an impossible futuristic dream when I was a kid, haha. (Yes, I was vaguely aware the Game Gear existed, but I'd never played one.) There was such a gulf between PC, console and handheld that's hard to truly appreciate today.
Anyway, as for Pokemon, I didn't get to appreciate most of the "mystery" aspects you talk about for myself, since I was a young teenager already and too old for that to work. Definitely get what you mean, though, and I had that with earlier games. It's a lovely effect for sure. While I think these aspects have more to do with your age when you played them (and the crudeness of the GB) than anything intrinsic to Pokemon in particular, I don't think it's strange that the series took off. The concept is great, and the execution was pretty well done. At least it felt that way at the time.
"a world so rich with mysterious and dangerous places where children are allowed to roam free and play with dangerous monsters is one that lends itself easily to horror"
Again, this is a great and evocative concept, and I'd love to see a game that fully embraces this. Also reminds me of Miyamoto citing his own rural childhood as an inspiration for Zelda. I never got much of that vibe from the games themselves personally, though. Their world felt pretty sanitized on the whole. They also seem to downplay the whole "kids on their own" concept so much the main character feels essentially ageless, especially combined with the crude graphics and silent protagonist treatment. Maybe it's the boring answer, but I suspect the series attracts a lot of this stuff because it's a) very popular and b) people love to take something and make it the opposite of what it is for the fun of it (ie. light to dark, dark to light).
Oh, and while I knew about the seizure debacle, I had no idea they've never shown the episode again. Wouldn't it be pretty easy to just edit out the seizure-inducing parts? I'd also love to see a full article on that leak. It's always neat to get a peek behind the curtain.
Haha, DKC definitely has a very distinct feel to them. I remember the one icy, blizzard mountain level, listening to the music and thinking, "This music just SOUNDS cold." Funny that such immense effort was put into a game about a giant ape collecting bananas, but a testament to the developer's passion. That aside, I also love abandoned industry, liminal spaces, all that kind of stuff. I feel like if Kanto was real there would be lots of great places for liminal space photos.
To your point bout the aspect of "mystery" being relative to my age, I think it more has to do with, as you also point out, the crudeness of the GB's graphics. Say, this is supposed to be a "city" with only ten NPCs in it and five buildings - even a kid understands it's not really what a city looks like, just a simplified overview of one with the most salient places represented. It makes you have to use your imagination to fill in the blanks and imagine what the city would actually look like. Color it in yourself. And, just like a good book, the details you project onto such things are bespoke to you, and therefor much more vivid and appealing than they would be otherwise. Like, when I imagine the Power Plant, I can see someone with less of a penchant for horror imagining it to be much less of a disturbing place than I would. I think this is part of the reason the newer games have felt so much dryer - as graphics have advanced, more details can be added in... but not enough to make them feel any more realistic as places. The cities still don't feel like cities, even if they look more like them, because in the newer games, you can see a city in the background... but you're hemmed in by invisible walls and can only walk down one street of it. Where's the fun in that? Where's the sense of adventure and exploration? Just give me the pared down, simplified city that feels like a place where there are things to do than wow me with graphics and details to look at but offers nothing to engage with. (Also, I would argue that Gen II had the perfect sweet spot graphically and, honestly, I really don't think my age factors into it because there are new fangames using the Gen II engine that capture that sense of mystery and adventure so much better than the actual canon. If you're curious, look up a fangame called Quarantine Crystal or Pokemon: Fool's Gold to see what I mean. They're genuinely the best projects with the Pokemon name attached to them to come out in years, if only because they capture the spirit of the old games so well but add in all the Quality of Life upgrades of future games that remove so many of their issues).
It's funny you mention Miyamoto - he also created the Pikmin series because of his gardening hobby. Makes me wonder if he ever went to the zoo and had an ape throw something at him. I also don't think your wrong about people the usual "edgy inversion of le wholesome chungus kids material" being a cause for the scads of Pokemon creepypasta, but I also would disagree with you that the original setting for Pokemon was sanitized. Sure, the originals were kid friendly (and I do agree that the crude graphics which, again, ties into the whole imagination factor I discussed), but the new ones... they never mention death, or anything like that. There's no moral ambiguity in the stories or threat to the villains. I'm not saying the original games were Shakespeare-tier writing, or anything, but the Gen III villains were eco-terrorists, Gen IV villains were looking to rend a hole in space-time to find an eldritch abomination to recreate the entire universe in the image of a sociopath, and Gen V's villains abused a child so they could summon a god and "liberate" all Pokemon (the equivalent of PETA trying to summon Cthulu for the sake of animal liberation)... only for them to find out that the guy running the show was just using their political cause d'etre to his own ends and he never really gave a fuck about liberating anything. In contrast, Gen VI's villains are hipster fashion designers that want the world to look a certain way. Gen VII was a dead cat bounce in quality across the board, both in story and gameplay, that featured probably the best villain in my opinion - they start off making you think the villains is this street gang run by a has-been thug, but it turns out that the real villain is a wealthy socialite/philanthropist who turns out to be going insane from exposure to interdimensional aliens (and abusing her kids behind closed doors). And she's also using the street thugs to do her dirty work on the side. After that there's, uh... a gang of goofy soccer hooligans in Gen VIII and in Gen IV it's just a bunch of school students who decide to "stick it to the bullies" under the direction of a socially retarded shut-in furry (I'm not making this up). And, to be fair... you could do something interesting with that kind of story, but naturally nothing comes of it and the socially retarded shut-in furry, after being beaten, just says "Okay we're friends now" and is never actually made to be accountable for her actions. There's also some stuff on the side with, again, abusive or neglectful parents, but it felt a lot like a retread of Gen VII.
Again, the stories were never high art, the characters were never particular complex (the aforementioned sociopathic philanthropist notwithstanding), but it felt as if there came a time - not coincidentally around the point where Americans began to have a larger part in the game developments - when it seems as if they decided "kids can't handle even a shred of darkness or nuance", and pretty much even the slightest bit of sinister intention got washed out. I could sperg about it for hours, believe me, but just trust me when I say that the new games feel very, very watered down compared to the old games. Compare and contrast with the anime and manga - the anime, after the first season, became over 1k episodes of exactly the same thing each time, and it got very stale, even for kids, fast. The manga on the other hand was much more entertaining, featured a broad cast of interesting and constantly changing protagonists, and fleshed out the world in more detail. It actually had a story beyond the anime's "Monster of the Day" format and really had a lot of substance to it (of course, it's a shonen series, so it isn't high art, but it's really good for what it is). It feels like the games, over time, wanted to emulate the thoughtless simplicity of the anime rather than really do anything interesting with a Pokemon world as a setting like the manga (if you're curious, the manga is widely known as Pokemon Special).
I think it would be easy to remove the seizure-inducing parts of the episode, but I think the studio was probably told in no uncertain terms by the Japanese police to just never air it again to save face. And, lastly, as much as I'd love to go into the leak, it was over two terabytes worth of information. They're still sorting through it all, even a week later. It's beyond interesting to get a look behind the cut content material because it really paints the picture of a company that truly wants to make great games - the scrapped story concepts and even the quality of the beta tests of later games are, believe it or not, better than what we actually got - but are restrained by their corporate overlords and forced to cut corners just to meet the time demands placed on them (i.e. up until this year Nintendo demanded a full Pokemon game release every year, which is just an unreasonable amount of time to make a good game in). I give GameFreak a lot of shit for being lazy but the leaks have proved their less lazy and just strapped for time because Big Daddy Nintendo needs that yearly chunk of change from a new Pokemon release. It's honestly sad. I'd love to see what they could make if allowed off their leash.
Very spooky. I didn't grow up with pokemon games but its cultural impact can't be discounted. Something a few of you may find neat: I went to an arcade with the wife recently, and tucked away in a corner, away from most eyes, was a BERSERK cabinet. One urbanized goes it caused the death of a kid in the 80s, something about flashing lights or a stabbing. Might be worth reading up on.
Kind of like Polybius... that's something I was reading about just the other day, coincidentally. I totally wasn't doing any research on it. The arcade in question wasn't Friar Tuck's Game Room in Calumet, IL, was it?
That's the one. From what I could tell a kid really did hang out there and passed away tragically due to a heart condition but you know how much we love to tell stories.
Yeah, there were two or three deaths associated with that particular cabinet at that particular arcade, and all of them were explained by either street violence (I believe one of them was murdered because he had bad blood with a thug) or medical conditions. Polybius may have similar roots in a real event that was recounted again and again until it became an urban legend. But, again - that's for another time.
In a silly, inconsequential way I will always be proud that I did indeed, catch (and trade) 'em all in Pokemon Red circa 1999-2001. I was already in high school, so it was a mostly clandestine affair to anyone my age. My Pokemon obsession was played out with my younger brother and his friends. And I'll always feel somewhat miffed at never being able to see the Porygon episode. If I recall, I think there was one other episode of the original run that never aired in America.
There were four that weren't aired in America, if I recall correctly, which were banned for various reasons including liberal pointing of guns at people's head, accusations of black face, and cross-dressing (I guess it was okay when the ten year old protagonist cross-dresses to get a badge but when an adult does it, that's where American censors draw the line?). I almost mentioned it in the article, but it was getting long enough as it was and it didn't feel germane to the main point at hand. I think you can actually find uploads of the infamous Porygon episode around the internet, if you feel inclined to watch 'em all on top of catch 'em all. Unfortunately, I was never able to catch 'em all in the original games. I know, I know; I'm a disappointment and a fraud. It wasn't until online trading became a thing that I actually completed a Pokedex.
Hahaha. No judgement not catching them all. I made a decent effort in Pokemon Silver, but the constant additions of new Pokemon to the series was a bit much to keep up with. If only they'd come out with updated Pokeraps for the next gen ones. When they started streaming the series on Netflix, it took maybe half a dozen episodes before I recalled the entire Pokerap with the original 150.
I had forgotten about Ash dressing up as a girl in that one episode. I guess they didn't cross the line of giving him boobies like this did with James, so not such a big deal. The still of a crossdressing James with breasts in that other lost episode has been stamped indelibly on my brain.
I'd love to see someone try and do an updated Pokerap with all 1k+ Pokemon in existence now. It could be done, and, knowing the fandom, I'm sure someone has at least tried, but I can't imagine it would be a fraction as memorable as the original. I don't remember the whole thing but I remember a good amount of it.
Funny enough I think the episode with James crossdressing did get aired in America, albeit with those scenes removed. I believe that it was only aired once though, because I feel as if I remember that same episode being the one where a giant tentacruel rampages through a city and destroys a tower, 9/11 happened, and you see where I'm going with that.
EDIT: I looked it up. They're not the same episode, but the one I'm thinking of was temporarily banned from broadcast after 9/11. It aired exactly once and never again. Then apparently Cartoon Network started airing Pokemon, aired it once, and it was promptly banned again after Hurricane Katrina, because the city is flooded by the giant tentacruel. I forget how ban happy they were back in those days, especially with anime.
I remember that one! I don't think I ever saw it aired on TV, but I do remember renti g and watching it on VHS at some point.
They really were ban happy, but it's easy to forget how controversial the mere existence of the show was in the first place, even leaving aside any specific controversies. I think the first mainstream anime just weirded out a lot of parents. I was taking about Pokemon with a friend a few years ago and he mentioned he wasn't allowed to watch it at all because the anime made both his parents uncomfortable. He's several years younger than me, but it reminded me what there were definitely other kids I knew who were also not allowed to watch it at the time.
Porygon did nothing wrong and I'm tired of pretending he (it?) did. Enough is enough. No more slander.
That being said, I almost touched on Missingno but, again, for the sake of length I didn't bring it up. Missingno and the other glitches (including Mew) are enough to warrant their own articles. If I have time, I might do a brief follow-up on them before the month is out. Things like Missingno and the Mew glitch add so much to the atmosphere of the games, even if they were unintended. You just don't have stuff like that with the newer installments.
COLE WAS RIGHT! Buried in thr recent game freak leak are old plans for Pokemon Rainbow which was slated to come just after Yellow. It would have been another gen 1.5.
I have so many good memories with my lime green Gameboy Color. My parents had just bought a house and were renovating it. They dragged me to all kinds of home supply shops, looking at paint swatches and different types of granite as a little boy was only interesting for a short time, but I always had my trusty Gameboy ready. I'd find a cozy place to sit, often underneath a display, and put the volume low enough not to disturb everyone. My best memories come from Gold & Silver. I loved the vibrant colours of Johto and all the new Pokémon to collect.
Out of all the popular 2000s urban legends, Lavender Town was the only one to have any real-world impact on me. The theme was genuinely unsettling. I usually played game boy with the sound off, but if I got to Lavender Town, I'd turn it on in snatches just to see if anything happened, and then turn it off again because I creeped myself out.
Your deep-dive into urban legends have been great reading (I am once again commenting on an older post after reading some of your newer posts, but the comment stands for the newer ones as well).
Excellent piece, bro. To this day, idk if its just a freaky placebo, but the lavender town theme will straight up make my ears hurt and my eyes start watering, no joke. used to have to play that section of the game with the sound turned off. Yellow was basically my first game. Eventually got Gold but kept getting screwed with copies with bad save batteries from the used game store lol. Emerald was the first one I got "new." Was old enough to be hype for diamond and then especially Heartgold. HG/SS was peak.
Thanks for the interesting read! It reminded me of the legend of the “Polybius” arcade game, which was also said to cause seizures and paranoia. The legend said it was created by the CIA to test sinister technology, and was surreptitiously placed in arcades by nameless Men In Black. I’m sure it has plenty of associated creepypastas…
Thank you for reading it, I'm glad you found it interesting. That being said... how interesting you mentioned Polybius. That's totally not something I've been researching recently...
I remember when the Pokemon craze swept through the little town I lived in at the time. It was a pretty distinct divide of the "normal" kids and us loser nerds who did stuff like play video games and D&D, read fantasy books, and watch anime. (I also remember when we called it "Japanimation" because that cringe was the term of the time.) A couple of my best friends already had the Cadillac-sized original Game-Boy when the games released, so each got a copy of Red and Blue respectively for their birthdays. I got in on it a bit later, after the Game-Boy Color released near the end of that year. Christmas rolled around and I'd gotten a lime green GBC, a stack of crazy attachments, (the screen magnifier with the build in light was great, the crappy joystick that clipped over the d-pad not so much) a copy of Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, and naturally, Pokemon Yellow.
Kids these days can call me a "Genwunner" all they want. They haven't, but they can, and I won't care. My time with the series lived and died in Gen I, both in terms of the video games, the show, and the TCG. They were fun for what they were, but the time in which this series came to establish a foothold in my life was one in which it would soon find itself competing against far better options.
Final Fantasy VII and Breath of Fire III held my attention in the JRPG world, followed a few short years later by the first Xenosaga on the PS2.
The Pokemon show was swiftly cast aside for the Toonami block once we moved out of the mountains and back to the city, where Cartoon Network was no longer sharing a channel with ESPN. Yes, weird as it sounds, Cartoon Network and ESPN shared the same channel in the town I grew up in, swapping over right at 4:00 PM, when Toonami was set to start. Suddenly, DBZ and the various animated superhero shows of the day were now open options for me, so Pokemon was soon cast aside.
And where the TCG is concerned, well, it's a bit of a surprising one. You might think, "Ah yes, it must've been Magic: The Gathering." You'd be right to assume I played it then, too, but I found MtG before the Pokemon TCG, and my core friend group played Pokemon more. However, our interest in that game was ultimately pretty short lived considering that, largely because of my best friend's stepdad, each of us had a massive collection of cards for the WildStorm Comics TCG that was, at the time, put out by Image. The game primarily featured characters and goons from the WildCats comic series, but also featured the likes of Savage Dragon and Spawn, so you can imagine why a bunch of nerdy teenage boys like us would flock to that over Pokemon. This was to say nothing of the deeper strategy involved with that game's deck building. Believe me when I say that we would spend hours upon hours refining our decks whenever we threw our little tournaments with each other.
Still, though short-lived, Pokemon did have a pretty big impact in my youth. Big enough that even living in a tiny tourist town in the California mountains with a population of a scant couple thousand, half of whom were retirees, my friends and I all still heard about the Porygon episode. Funny how that works.
I also had a lime green GBC. Clearly, it's the color of choice for patricians of discerning taste, even though I didn't pick the color because it was originally a gift I didn't ask for, as was Pokemon Red. My dad actually bought them for me as a birthday gift as some sort of weird swipe at my mom because she didn't want me playing Pokemon, watching the show, etc. She had heard all the rumors about it being demonic and what not, but after watching a few episode of the anime with me she got over it pretty quick and became a Pokemon enabler for me. Believe it or not, Pokemon Red was my first video game, so it was my introduction to pretty much all "nerd" adjacent media. Really, my dad might as well have just handed me a crack pipe - it might have done less damage in the long run, but, here we are all the same...
I am guessing I'm a few years older than you (37) since my first game was Wolfenstein 3D on the family 386--in hindsight maybe it was not such a good idea to introduce a five year old to Nazis and World War II--and then Doom. So Pokemon didn't have much edge for me, but it certainly had more than the excessively cutesy later generations (I think the anime was a bad influence on the games--even when I was 12 I absolutely hated the anime and that gormless crybaby Ash Ketchum).
I think one aspect to the sense of danger in Gen I was that building a good team was very difficult without a guide and it was very easy to end up with a team (or just an overleveled starter) who would get steamrolled by Sabrina or Lance (I never beat Lance playing Yellow version back in the day--and no, I did not use Pikachu, his ass got shoved into a PC box and forgotten). In later generations, if you understand the type chart you can walk all over the bosses even without foreknowledge because of the abundance of strong Pokemon and moves of various types.
P.S. have you played any of the rom hacks? Some of them are properly hard though I generally find their attempts to explore mature themes rather farcical (DarkViolet has a scene where Team Rocket shoot Cubone'a mother--with guns!--in front of you and it just doesn't work at all). Unbound and Polished Crystal are probably the best of them.
Oh yeah and while we're on the subject of Game Boys, I remember in the early 2000s I got a black GBA with the Afterburner frontlight kit for Christmas and I was immensely proud of it, even though it was heavy, ate batteries like a Game Gear, and the screen was dimmer than the GBA SP that came out only a year later, because it was special and a GBA SP was not. I probably still have it somewhere.
For what it's worth, my dad let me watch him play games like Wolfenstein, Doom, and others when I was young. I'd sit in his lap and he'd let me use the disconnected joystick to think I was playing while he was using the keyboard, so... it could be worse.
That being said, the Pokemon anime did have a deleterious effect on the series as a whole; the original games and their immediate predecessors were largely divorced from the anime in a lot of ways, but as the anime took off into the stratosphere future installments would take more and more cues from it (i.e. Pokemon were never intended to only say their names, which is a frankly dumbass element introduced by the anime; they're basically animals, and were always supposed to make animal sounds). Gradually, as more and more of the original team moved into different positions or left entirely, they were replaced by newcomers who were heavily influenced by the anime. The direct result of this is the hokey, half-baked gimmicks added to every new Generation that seem like ideas ripped from a bad tokusatsu show. It's sad because the core gameplay loop is good enough to not need these poorly thought out and silly gimmicks ham-fistedly shoved in to sell toys or give the anime more to do.
There's also a lot to be said about how easy the games have become. I agree that the difficulty of Gen I makes it more of an appealing replay than the newer games, which, like I said in the article, hold your hand to the point that the game plays itself. In Gen V they introduced a "hard mode" - I've never understood why that doesn't make a return, but that would also take a modicum of effort, and GameFreak has proven that they clearly don't like exerting more than the bare minimum.
Lastly, I have played several ROM Hacks. There's something of a renaissance of them going on at present where actual good, solid games that aren't bogged down by excessive and puerile edginess that defines so many younger ones; some are more absurd than others, and there's still some stinkers, but a lot of the newer ones are just straight-forward, old-fashioned Pokemon games, no frills or fluff.
My personal favorite is Quarantine Crystal; Polished Crystal is good, but no other fangame has captured the feeling of going into the original two games for the first time quite like that one. The biggest problem is the creator, for reasons unknown to me, ditched a few of the coolest Pokemon created for it for his own personal gag Pokemon that suck, but I also think he had a mental breakdown and left the team so other people are finishing it now (since only the first half is complete). Still, I'd recommend it. It'll remind you what was so much fun about the originals.
Which hacks would you recommend, then?
I thought Unbound was actually pretty good with making some of the later generations' gimmicks suck less. It has Mega Evolutions, Z-Moves, and, in a few select battles, Dynamax, but it doesn't have Gigantomax or the one that makes a Ring Pop sprout of your Pokemon's forehead). It makes you go through a whole dungeon and fight a boss with a Mega Altaria to earn the right to use Mega Evolutions, and all of the later boss trainers have their own Megas. And on top of that, you have to hunt far and wide for Mega Stones, often having to battle special "Mega Trainers" who use the same Mega Stone that they give you when they are defeated (so to use Mega Alakazam, you have to beat a trainer with a Mega Alakazam, and he will probably beat you at least once. In Pokemon Y, Mega Charizard Y was a freebie that served as an I Win button for almost every battle in the entire game. In Unbound, Mega Charizard Y was a reward I had to work very hard for, revisiting an old dungeon and finding very remote secrets to get Charizite Y, and then spending $50,000 and abusing save states to get a Charmander egg from the Egg Lady in Magnolia Town (she will give you one of around 30 eggs at random), and then I had to grind 60 levels on that Charmander to catch it up with the rest of my team, and even then Mega Charizard Y was extremely powerful but far less invulnerable than in Pokemon Y--despite the fact that I used the late-game IV trainer and a very rare Gold Bottle Cap to max out all its IVs, an NPC unlocked by a sidequest to change its nature to Modest (in what was implied to be an extremely painful brain surgery that made Charizard hate me for a while), and used the Power Lens and Power Anklet items to EV train it, meaning I had about the most powerful Charizard possible. Then you can't even use Z-Moves until the postgame...but some late-game trainers can!
I also think Unbound in general makes a nice introduction to more "competitive" styles of Pokemon combat because of the late game options to optimize your team (though you won't be able to fully optimize all of them with the available resources) and because the game is really hard--not Radical Red hard (unless you play on Very Hard or Insane, the latter of which gives many boss trainers illegal Pokemon with too many EVs or early evolutions or the like for the true masochists) but much, much harder than the mainline games. Even "Vanilla" is no cakewalk and "Difficult", which I played on, was a real challenge, especially since the boss encounters scale to your level so their mons are always 2-4 levels higher than yours.
I couldn't even tell you what my first video game was because it was one of those horrible edutainment games run on the old HP computer my dad took from his office to make the family computer. It ran with Windows 3.1, back in the days of Chip's Challenge and Ski Free lol
Thanks for this nice little retrospective. I especially liked the paragraph about the abandoned power plant and the other eerie places of Kanto. Very evocative writing, and you honestly make it sound much more interesting that what's in the actual game(s). Especially since I have a bit of a soft spot for that kind of "abandoned industrial creepiness", for lack of a better term. See also the factory levels in Donkey Kong Country from the same time if you intentionally overthink them, once again helped by the atmospheric soundtrack.
Anyway, like The Man Behind the Screen above, I'm also a "genwunner" by default in that I've only played the first game pair of the series. By the time Pokemon became a phenomenon I was aging out of the target audience, but I did enjoy them as surprisingly involved and intricate JRPGs, especially on the very limited GameBoy. That system had better and more ambitious games than it had a right to, like these and Link's Awakening. In fact, I think the GB is intriguing in itself, in terms of how long-lived it was and also how laughably primitive it was. I remember very well how a portable system with color graphics seemed like an impossible futuristic dream when I was a kid, haha. (Yes, I was vaguely aware the Game Gear existed, but I'd never played one.) There was such a gulf between PC, console and handheld that's hard to truly appreciate today.
Anyway, as for Pokemon, I didn't get to appreciate most of the "mystery" aspects you talk about for myself, since I was a young teenager already and too old for that to work. Definitely get what you mean, though, and I had that with earlier games. It's a lovely effect for sure. While I think these aspects have more to do with your age when you played them (and the crudeness of the GB) than anything intrinsic to Pokemon in particular, I don't think it's strange that the series took off. The concept is great, and the execution was pretty well done. At least it felt that way at the time.
"a world so rich with mysterious and dangerous places where children are allowed to roam free and play with dangerous monsters is one that lends itself easily to horror"
Again, this is a great and evocative concept, and I'd love to see a game that fully embraces this. Also reminds me of Miyamoto citing his own rural childhood as an inspiration for Zelda. I never got much of that vibe from the games themselves personally, though. Their world felt pretty sanitized on the whole. They also seem to downplay the whole "kids on their own" concept so much the main character feels essentially ageless, especially combined with the crude graphics and silent protagonist treatment. Maybe it's the boring answer, but I suspect the series attracts a lot of this stuff because it's a) very popular and b) people love to take something and make it the opposite of what it is for the fun of it (ie. light to dark, dark to light).
Oh, and while I knew about the seizure debacle, I had no idea they've never shown the episode again. Wouldn't it be pretty easy to just edit out the seizure-inducing parts? I'd also love to see a full article on that leak. It's always neat to get a peek behind the curtain.
Haha, DKC definitely has a very distinct feel to them. I remember the one icy, blizzard mountain level, listening to the music and thinking, "This music just SOUNDS cold." Funny that such immense effort was put into a game about a giant ape collecting bananas, but a testament to the developer's passion. That aside, I also love abandoned industry, liminal spaces, all that kind of stuff. I feel like if Kanto was real there would be lots of great places for liminal space photos.
To your point bout the aspect of "mystery" being relative to my age, I think it more has to do with, as you also point out, the crudeness of the GB's graphics. Say, this is supposed to be a "city" with only ten NPCs in it and five buildings - even a kid understands it's not really what a city looks like, just a simplified overview of one with the most salient places represented. It makes you have to use your imagination to fill in the blanks and imagine what the city would actually look like. Color it in yourself. And, just like a good book, the details you project onto such things are bespoke to you, and therefor much more vivid and appealing than they would be otherwise. Like, when I imagine the Power Plant, I can see someone with less of a penchant for horror imagining it to be much less of a disturbing place than I would. I think this is part of the reason the newer games have felt so much dryer - as graphics have advanced, more details can be added in... but not enough to make them feel any more realistic as places. The cities still don't feel like cities, even if they look more like them, because in the newer games, you can see a city in the background... but you're hemmed in by invisible walls and can only walk down one street of it. Where's the fun in that? Where's the sense of adventure and exploration? Just give me the pared down, simplified city that feels like a place where there are things to do than wow me with graphics and details to look at but offers nothing to engage with. (Also, I would argue that Gen II had the perfect sweet spot graphically and, honestly, I really don't think my age factors into it because there are new fangames using the Gen II engine that capture that sense of mystery and adventure so much better than the actual canon. If you're curious, look up a fangame called Quarantine Crystal or Pokemon: Fool's Gold to see what I mean. They're genuinely the best projects with the Pokemon name attached to them to come out in years, if only because they capture the spirit of the old games so well but add in all the Quality of Life upgrades of future games that remove so many of their issues).
It's funny you mention Miyamoto - he also created the Pikmin series because of his gardening hobby. Makes me wonder if he ever went to the zoo and had an ape throw something at him. I also don't think your wrong about people the usual "edgy inversion of le wholesome chungus kids material" being a cause for the scads of Pokemon creepypasta, but I also would disagree with you that the original setting for Pokemon was sanitized. Sure, the originals were kid friendly (and I do agree that the crude graphics which, again, ties into the whole imagination factor I discussed), but the new ones... they never mention death, or anything like that. There's no moral ambiguity in the stories or threat to the villains. I'm not saying the original games were Shakespeare-tier writing, or anything, but the Gen III villains were eco-terrorists, Gen IV villains were looking to rend a hole in space-time to find an eldritch abomination to recreate the entire universe in the image of a sociopath, and Gen V's villains abused a child so they could summon a god and "liberate" all Pokemon (the equivalent of PETA trying to summon Cthulu for the sake of animal liberation)... only for them to find out that the guy running the show was just using their political cause d'etre to his own ends and he never really gave a fuck about liberating anything. In contrast, Gen VI's villains are hipster fashion designers that want the world to look a certain way. Gen VII was a dead cat bounce in quality across the board, both in story and gameplay, that featured probably the best villain in my opinion - they start off making you think the villains is this street gang run by a has-been thug, but it turns out that the real villain is a wealthy socialite/philanthropist who turns out to be going insane from exposure to interdimensional aliens (and abusing her kids behind closed doors). And she's also using the street thugs to do her dirty work on the side. After that there's, uh... a gang of goofy soccer hooligans in Gen VIII and in Gen IV it's just a bunch of school students who decide to "stick it to the bullies" under the direction of a socially retarded shut-in furry (I'm not making this up). And, to be fair... you could do something interesting with that kind of story, but naturally nothing comes of it and the socially retarded shut-in furry, after being beaten, just says "Okay we're friends now" and is never actually made to be accountable for her actions. There's also some stuff on the side with, again, abusive or neglectful parents, but it felt a lot like a retread of Gen VII.
Again, the stories were never high art, the characters were never particular complex (the aforementioned sociopathic philanthropist notwithstanding), but it felt as if there came a time - not coincidentally around the point where Americans began to have a larger part in the game developments - when it seems as if they decided "kids can't handle even a shred of darkness or nuance", and pretty much even the slightest bit of sinister intention got washed out. I could sperg about it for hours, believe me, but just trust me when I say that the new games feel very, very watered down compared to the old games. Compare and contrast with the anime and manga - the anime, after the first season, became over 1k episodes of exactly the same thing each time, and it got very stale, even for kids, fast. The manga on the other hand was much more entertaining, featured a broad cast of interesting and constantly changing protagonists, and fleshed out the world in more detail. It actually had a story beyond the anime's "Monster of the Day" format and really had a lot of substance to it (of course, it's a shonen series, so it isn't high art, but it's really good for what it is). It feels like the games, over time, wanted to emulate the thoughtless simplicity of the anime rather than really do anything interesting with a Pokemon world as a setting like the manga (if you're curious, the manga is widely known as Pokemon Special).
I think it would be easy to remove the seizure-inducing parts of the episode, but I think the studio was probably told in no uncertain terms by the Japanese police to just never air it again to save face. And, lastly, as much as I'd love to go into the leak, it was over two terabytes worth of information. They're still sorting through it all, even a week later. It's beyond interesting to get a look behind the cut content material because it really paints the picture of a company that truly wants to make great games - the scrapped story concepts and even the quality of the beta tests of later games are, believe it or not, better than what we actually got - but are restrained by their corporate overlords and forced to cut corners just to meet the time demands placed on them (i.e. up until this year Nintendo demanded a full Pokemon game release every year, which is just an unreasonable amount of time to make a good game in). I give GameFreak a lot of shit for being lazy but the leaks have proved their less lazy and just strapped for time because Big Daddy Nintendo needs that yearly chunk of change from a new Pokemon release. It's honestly sad. I'd love to see what they could make if allowed off their leash.
Very spooky. I didn't grow up with pokemon games but its cultural impact can't be discounted. Something a few of you may find neat: I went to an arcade with the wife recently, and tucked away in a corner, away from most eyes, was a BERSERK cabinet. One urbanized goes it caused the death of a kid in the 80s, something about flashing lights or a stabbing. Might be worth reading up on.
Kind of like Polybius... that's something I was reading about just the other day, coincidentally. I totally wasn't doing any research on it. The arcade in question wasn't Friar Tuck's Game Room in Calumet, IL, was it?
That's the one. From what I could tell a kid really did hang out there and passed away tragically due to a heart condition but you know how much we love to tell stories.
Yeah, there were two or three deaths associated with that particular cabinet at that particular arcade, and all of them were explained by either street violence (I believe one of them was murdered because he had bad blood with a thug) or medical conditions. Polybius may have similar roots in a real event that was recounted again and again until it became an urban legend. But, again - that's for another time.
In a silly, inconsequential way I will always be proud that I did indeed, catch (and trade) 'em all in Pokemon Red circa 1999-2001. I was already in high school, so it was a mostly clandestine affair to anyone my age. My Pokemon obsession was played out with my younger brother and his friends. And I'll always feel somewhat miffed at never being able to see the Porygon episode. If I recall, I think there was one other episode of the original run that never aired in America.
There were four that weren't aired in America, if I recall correctly, which were banned for various reasons including liberal pointing of guns at people's head, accusations of black face, and cross-dressing (I guess it was okay when the ten year old protagonist cross-dresses to get a badge but when an adult does it, that's where American censors draw the line?). I almost mentioned it in the article, but it was getting long enough as it was and it didn't feel germane to the main point at hand. I think you can actually find uploads of the infamous Porygon episode around the internet, if you feel inclined to watch 'em all on top of catch 'em all. Unfortunately, I was never able to catch 'em all in the original games. I know, I know; I'm a disappointment and a fraud. It wasn't until online trading became a thing that I actually completed a Pokedex.
Hahaha. No judgement not catching them all. I made a decent effort in Pokemon Silver, but the constant additions of new Pokemon to the series was a bit much to keep up with. If only they'd come out with updated Pokeraps for the next gen ones. When they started streaming the series on Netflix, it took maybe half a dozen episodes before I recalled the entire Pokerap with the original 150.
I had forgotten about Ash dressing up as a girl in that one episode. I guess they didn't cross the line of giving him boobies like this did with James, so not such a big deal. The still of a crossdressing James with breasts in that other lost episode has been stamped indelibly on my brain.
I'd love to see someone try and do an updated Pokerap with all 1k+ Pokemon in existence now. It could be done, and, knowing the fandom, I'm sure someone has at least tried, but I can't imagine it would be a fraction as memorable as the original. I don't remember the whole thing but I remember a good amount of it.
Funny enough I think the episode with James crossdressing did get aired in America, albeit with those scenes removed. I believe that it was only aired once though, because I feel as if I remember that same episode being the one where a giant tentacruel rampages through a city and destroys a tower, 9/11 happened, and you see where I'm going with that.
EDIT: I looked it up. They're not the same episode, but the one I'm thinking of was temporarily banned from broadcast after 9/11. It aired exactly once and never again. Then apparently Cartoon Network started airing Pokemon, aired it once, and it was promptly banned again after Hurricane Katrina, because the city is flooded by the giant tentacruel. I forget how ban happy they were back in those days, especially with anime.
I remember that one! I don't think I ever saw it aired on TV, but I do remember renti g and watching it on VHS at some point.
They really were ban happy, but it's easy to forget how controversial the mere existence of the show was in the first place, even leaving aside any specific controversies. I think the first mainstream anime just weirded out a lot of parents. I was taking about Pokemon with a friend a few years ago and he mentioned he wasn't allowed to watch it at all because the anime made both his parents uncomfortable. He's several years younger than me, but it reminded me what there were definitely other kids I knew who were also not allowed to watch it at the time.
#JusticeforPorygon (my favorite Pokémon)
I love the mysteriousness of older games. I’m surprised you didn’t mention Missingno. Great example of mystery and programming error.
Porygon did nothing wrong and I'm tired of pretending he (it?) did. Enough is enough. No more slander.
That being said, I almost touched on Missingno but, again, for the sake of length I didn't bring it up. Missingno and the other glitches (including Mew) are enough to warrant their own articles. If I have time, I might do a brief follow-up on them before the month is out. Things like Missingno and the Mew glitch add so much to the atmosphere of the games, even if they were unintended. You just don't have stuff like that with the newer installments.
COLE WAS RIGHT! Buried in thr recent game freak leak are old plans for Pokemon Rainbow which was slated to come just after Yellow. It would have been another gen 1.5.
(This is a complete lie.)
Cole I know that's you. We still have a score to settle.
I have so many good memories with my lime green Gameboy Color. My parents had just bought a house and were renovating it. They dragged me to all kinds of home supply shops, looking at paint swatches and different types of granite as a little boy was only interesting for a short time, but I always had my trusty Gameboy ready. I'd find a cozy place to sit, often underneath a display, and put the volume low enough not to disturb everyone. My best memories come from Gold & Silver. I loved the vibrant colours of Johto and all the new Pokémon to collect.
Here's a nostalgic song from Gold & Silver that sounds like simpler times: https://youtu.be/64obE19g6Mk?si=X7Q04KTf1IhxU97C
Out of all the popular 2000s urban legends, Lavender Town was the only one to have any real-world impact on me. The theme was genuinely unsettling. I usually played game boy with the sound off, but if I got to Lavender Town, I'd turn it on in snatches just to see if anything happened, and then turn it off again because I creeped myself out.
Your deep-dive into urban legends have been great reading (I am once again commenting on an older post after reading some of your newer posts, but the comment stands for the newer ones as well).
Excellent piece, bro. To this day, idk if its just a freaky placebo, but the lavender town theme will straight up make my ears hurt and my eyes start watering, no joke. used to have to play that section of the game with the sound turned off. Yellow was basically my first game. Eventually got Gold but kept getting screwed with copies with bad save batteries from the used game store lol. Emerald was the first one I got "new." Was old enough to be hype for diamond and then especially Heartgold. HG/SS was peak.