Money changed hands, and soon I was smuggling the game home to play where no one could see it happening. I informed him, perhaps too emphatically, that I was buying the game for my little brother. He wanted $10, a manageable amount even for a kid without an allowance. Salvation came in the form of a fellow eighth grader with a slightly beat up-looking copy of Pokémon Yellow: Special Pikachu Edition (a version of Pokémon Blue/Red that had been changed to more closely follow the events of the anime). My aforementioned shame issues meant asking for a copy for my birthday or Christmas was right out. I needed a real copy of the game, but I had no money or means of conveyance.
The Game Boy emulators of the day provided a pretty cruddy experience on my computer’s 133MHz Pentium, and all of my pocket monsters were trapped on the computer, unable to battle or be traded with people playing the actual game on actual Game Boys. I already mentioned that my very first Pokémon experience was actually thanks to an almost certainly illegal emulation of Pokémon Blue. That experience set the tone for the next decade-plus of Pokémon playing: done in secret, kept to myself, a source of shame. Even once he (er, me) finally gave in to his curiosity and began playing Pokémon Blue (via the No$gmb emulator on the computer), he only played it with headphones in and the door to his bedroom closed. Having an eight-year-old brother slavishly devoted to the games, and the anime, and the trading cards, told Young Andrew all he needed to know about the age of kids who were into Pokémon. I’ve been playing Pokémon games since I was 13, and I’ve felt just a little too old for the games pretty much the entire time. The piece re-emerged once before in February 2016 for the 20th anniversary of the original release of Pokémon Red and Green in Japan, and it originally ran in October 2013.
To remember this gaming landmark, we're resurfacing this classic Ars tale of franchise fandom over Labor Day Weekend. While popular previously in Japan, the franchise's impact has been felt in the US ever since. On August 27, 1998, Topeka, Kansas became Topikachu for one day-a ceremonial renaming to celebrate the US arrival of a new video game franchise, Pokémon.
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