Games fanaticMy first Pokémon was a Chikorita named Chicky, and I loved that little green horse with all my heart. I got to Pokémon a little later than many of my friends and peers, as I had missed Pokémon Red and Blue by not owning a Game Boy, but I spent many hours watching others wander around the creepy little graveyard of Lavender Town , or showing Pikachu’s smile face in Pokémon Yellow.
I knew I wanted to be a part of this craze, so by the time I finally got my hands on a Game Boy Color, I made sure to tell my parents to buy me Pokémon Gold. My little brother got Pokémon Silver and we shared ownership of a Link Cable. It was a magic time.
At the time, I didn’t know much about typing benefits – and I didn’t really care. Pokémon is a game for most kids where you get a pet and have it fight other people’s pets, and while a rudimentary understanding of the basic rock-paper-scissors triangle of “Fire beats grass, water beats fire, grass beats water “will take you pretty far, it gets a bit more complicated trying to come up with reasoning for Bug Type beats Psychic Type, or Fighting Type beats Normal Type. It’s best to just ignore all those things and get a lot of moves to hit hard.
My sweet Chicky was quickly joined by a whole host of other Pokémon that I usually loved because they were cute. The Togepi you get early in the game was one of my favorites called “Eggy” because kids are terrible at coming up with creative names. He had a metronome, a move that was randomly drawn from every available move, and although metronome is not a good tactical Pokémon move, it made my battles unexpected and surprising every time.
I also had a Mareep named – points to guess correctly – “Sheepy”, and a Golduck, “Ducky”, trying to give my company a little more power. My favorite of all was – and still is – Swinub, the kind of pig slime that, let’s be real, I probably called “Piggy.” I was incredibly disappointed when he turned into a big ugly Piloswine, but at least that meant we could be a little more fierce in battle.
By the time I reached the seemingly endless maze of tunnels that formed the Victory Road to the Pokémon League’s final step, I had a level 70 Meganium (Chicky), plus the Ho-Oh I just caught, and the Lugia from my brother who I had him swapped because I’m a terrible sister. My first time tackling the Elite Four – well, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that my squad, made up of Pokémon chosen for their cuteness, didn’t get very far.
Back to Victory Road to hit some Onixen, and a few hours later – still no joy. I’ve spent all my money on Revives and Hyper Potions, but I barely had time to use them among the Elite Four’s elite, one-hit kill moves. It didn’t look great for my team – we got wiped out, time and time again, and I couldn’t help but imagine that each of the Elite Four would see this idiot kid enter their room over and over again and a little bit feel sorry for me. But I wasn’t about to give up. This was an era before “playing something else” was an option. This was my game, and I was going to do it rhythm it, even if it took forever.
Time to get serious then. Cue montage music.
At the time, the only way to find information about a game was to beg my parents on the Internet for half an hour, and since we were using the dial-up modem that used the phone lines, it took a while. a lot of convince. It was pricey, and it meant we couldn’t receive or make phone calls, so it was a pain too. In that half hour, I tried to find all the information I could find on Ask Jeeves, the pre-Google search engine designed around a butler and print it in huge bundles of paper (also expensive, also inconvenient).
Armed with my newfound knowledge, a ton of supplies, and my brother’s level 70 Feraligatr (for which I traded him a Magikarp – sorry), I was finally ready to run up those stairs as Rocky.
Finally, painfully, I passed Champion Lance, only to be greeted by Professor Oak. Hey! I know that guy from TV! The Pokémon anime was super popular at the time, so the thrill of being greeted by a true celebrity in the Hall of Fame was almost Lake exciting than actually getting there. It’s a shame screenshots didn’t exist back then because I wish I had proof that my sweet, sweet Chicky was celebrated like a champ.
But that wasn’t the last surprise Pokémon Gold had for me. The incredible thing about playing games before the internet took over our entire lives is that we had it no idea what was in the store. Spoilers were a rarity, and most were communicated through false playground rumors, such as being able to get hold of the Triforce in Ocarina of Time, or whether there is a mysterious pyramid in the Gerudo Desert. So when Pokémon Gold ended, only to reveal … a whole new world to explore, it was one of the best moments of my young life.
I had missed Pokémon Red and Blue, but Kanto had just opened up to me like a blooming flower, allowing me to experience a scaled-down version of the original game, gym badges and all.
The amazing post-game secret of a whole second world, I would later discover, was thanks to Satoru Iwata, the former Nintendo president whose legacy has affected my life in more ways than I can ever know. His unexpected death came just a few months after Official Nintendo Magazine – my first game journalism job – closed down and the world seemed worse. He was a creative visionary and genius programmer whose efforts to teach Game Freak how to compress Pokémon Gold and Silver left enough room on the cartridge for Kanto, an addition that basically saved the Pokémon series.
There are very few people in this world that I mourn, even though I never know them. Steve Irwin is one of them. Satoru Iwata is another. I miss his irreverent Nintendo Direct appearances and discover that he was often the person behind some of Nintendo’s best business decisions. Iwata didn’t work for Game Freak, or even Nintendo, when he helped out with Pokémon Gold and Silver – he was at HAL Laboratory, where he worked on Kirby and Earthbound – but it’s because of him that the games came to the West, and Kanto both. added figuratively and literally to the map.
I started Pokémon Gold as a kid who just wanted to get into a video game craze, but I ended it as a lifelong Pokémon fan. I could never have predicted that the game would give me so much more than I expected, and that it would cause ripples all my life too. I didn’t even expect to finish this piece with a tribute to Iwata, but nearly six years after his loss, his story lives on in my fond memories of his work.
I often think back to my time with Chicky, the plant horse. No Pokémon game has quite managed to replicate the sense of connection with my very first Starter since then. Since then, I’ve defeated almost every Elite Four, Pokémon League, and Champion, usually with a similar party consisting of my Starter, the first bird Pokémon I caught, the Legendary game, and a selection of strong backups. But that great feeling of discovering that the world was twice the size you realized … that’s a once-in-a-lifetime feeling. Pokémon Gold was the start of my journey through the world of Pokémon, but it also let me experience what I had been missing. What a fantastic game.