by Jon Buhner
As long as you were born in the early nineties, even the late eighties, you know the drill. You pull out the Gameboy Color or Advance, pop in those new AA batteries, blow out the cartridge, push it in, and slide the little “on” switch. Then the notorious Nintendo logo appears with its famous ring sound, and the introduction begins, with the theme music and the 16-bit animations.
Many students can recall the times in their childhood when they played Pokemon, almost constantly, to the point where they had a stockpile of AA batteries. Not only was it both fun and entertaining, but friends could play together by “battling” and “trading,” while at the same time teaching young children to read and promoting other educational ideas.
From a personal standpoint, Pokemon was truly the only video game I owned and played, following the subsequent releases of the new games, or “versions” as dubbed by Nintendo. The first video game I ever played, Pokemon Gold Version, entertained me for several years, and over this time period, I moved onto Silver and Crystal Version. Then I decided to try a throwback, with Blue version, and I exploited the notorious rare candy glitch, that of which any avid Pokemon player should know very well about. Several years later, the Gameboy Advanced had been released, and I finally purchased one. This now allowed me to play Pokemon Sapphire, Ruby, and Emerald versions, further worsening my addiction. To add to this growing problem, these newer versions of the games were even more entertaining, intuitive, and time consuming. After about two or three more years of this uncontrolled rampage, I finally and difficultly retired from the profession.
I had finally reached the hiatus stage of Pokemon in my life, but it was only a matter of time before the addiction returned worse than ever before. The relapse began towards the end of tenth grade, with the rediscovery of my cyan blue Gameboy Color, with my Gold, Silver, and Crystal versions. It started slow at first, but aggressively progressed, to the point where I began bringing a bright purple link cable to school to battle Steve Sleasman in chemistry class. Summer quickly came, and I managed to plateau, limiting the amount of play time to a reasonable amount. Halfway through Junior year, I made the unfortunate discovery of a computer program called VBA, which would allow anyone to play any Pokemon game released up to the Leafgreen and Firered versions.
Taking advantage of this opportunity, I created a computer disk that contained every Pokemon version on a single disk with the emulator program, and I made copies for my friends. At this point, the madness had begun, and for the remainder of the school year, numerous juniors and seniors began playing Pokemon. The emulator proved to be a lot of fun, but playing Pokemon on a computer was awkward, since the majority of us started playing on a Gameboy. We quickly came to this realization, and began finding our long lost electronics and cartridges, playing the games they were meant to be played. The phenomenon lasted for several months, and like its original demise, died down after several months.
