"I surfed first-wave Pokémania. Today, the video games are as much a part of kids’ fiction as Disney"
Last weekend marked the 25th anniversary of Pokémon Red and Blue (or Red and Green in their native Japan), the first video games in a series that truly would take over the world.
The phenomenon that began in 1996 was slow to build. It was two years before the games were released in the US, and more than three before European children like me could play them. But by the time Pokémon arrived here, it was a ready-made pop culture explosion, with a TV series, trading cards and endless merch arriving from Japan alongside those weird, compelling, extraordinary Game Boy games. Pretty much nobody under the age of 11 in the year 1999 escaped Pokémon’s gravitational pull.
I was exactly the right age to be carried along on the first wave of Pokémania, which means that its 25th anniversary celebrations make me feel old. I begged my parents for years for a Game Boy, specifically to play Pokémon. My first experiences with Pokémon were reading about it in my Nintendo magazines, running a version of it in my imagination that was absolutely the greatest video game of all time.
What I discovered instead when my parents relented and bought me and my brother a Game Boy Color was a rudimentary-looking and strangely captivating game that turned out to be as much about maths as about collecting and battling monsters. Pokémon had millions of kids doing algebra voluntarily, mentally computing type advantages and movesets and evolution stats, studying tables of numbers in our guidebooks before deciding on the makeup of our squads.