Feeling Nostalgic today. What was your first memory of Pokemon? For me it was when I was 6 years old (September 2007?) and I had been bugging my older brother (pokemania kid) for weeks to play Pokemon Diamond. Uncharacteristically he decides to be nice and actually give it to me, and I think that was the same day I got Pokemon Mystery Dungeon as well. My older brother was usually a jerk but he had moments like that make me wish we were closer. God I miss him so much.
Or it may have been watching said older brother play Pokemon Yellow on my Gamecube. It was probably a bit earlier that year.
>>59684983The first episode of the Pokemon anime when it premiered on CN
>>59684983I'm assuming I was three years old around this time. My parents came home with Pokemon Ruby one day and I don't know why. Maybe my brother watched the anime one day and liked what he saw? Unlikely, he would've been 4 at the time Maybe it's because they saw news reports on Pokemania back in the day and got the latest Pokemon game once they had kids? We would end up getting Sapphire a few days later, which ended up being mine. Still have the copy too, though the label was peeled off and the save data was overwritten multiple times.
>>59684983My first experience playing pokemon was Christmas 2008, me and my brothers all got ds lites with pokemon diamond or pearlI chose Piplup and they chose the other two startersDon't remember the teams but I know for sure I used starly and my brother found a shiny gastly at lost tower
>>59684983Getting Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of Time and a Nintendo DS for my birthday, I remember getting frustrated at the personality quiz because I was using the top screen with my stylus (didn’t realize it only worked with the bottom one)
>>59684983Watching the Pokemon anime. Earliest episode I can remember watching was the Farfetch'd episode.
>>59685061so cool that MD was your first in the seriesI started with Blue, but my older bro and I shared a yellow gbc and Yellow version. I couldn't read. Got stuck in Viridian Forest and Mt Moon for months didnt care I was 3 years old lmao
>>59684983My cousin letting me have his copy of Platinum.
>>59684983First first? TV ads on German TV station on our local (Polish) cable TV, 1999.First actually relevant? First day preparing for elementary school, my twin brother had a pissy fit and way crying in bed, I was eating breakfast and got blasted with first episode of anime. I'm pretty sure that it rewired my brain somehow. 2000.
>>59685143First experience with games came like two-three years later thanks to emulation.
>>59684983Diamond was also my first game, and I have quite a few memories of my first play through;>The Flavor text from the rock smash rocks in ravaged path made me think I needed a specific pokemon rather than a special move to get by, so I caught every mon several times over and tried them all (to no avail)>Got stuck on Mars and Gardenia since my only decent battler was a Prinplup with Bubble, Metal claw and Peck. Gardenia especially took me a very long time to beat, I recall being in the windows isle of a home depot with my mom when I finally won. >Got stuck after gym 4 cause I didn't realize you needed to talk to the galactic grunt outside the great marsh to continue. I also got stuck after the Veilstone galactic base for so long that I had a level 70 Empoleon by the time I finally stumbled my way onto the snowy peak of Mt Coronet. >I challenged the resident rich kid (who had cheats unlocked) to a battle, and my friends all spent hours grinding their level 60-70+ starters to lend me for the battle. It was basically a team of overleveled starters vs a team of level 100 legendaries, so I obviously lost, but the hype was immense anyway (we didnt really understand cheats so we just thought he was an impossibly OP player).
Playing Pokemon Gold at 4 years old and nicknaming my Totodile "Totodile"
>>59685176did you also name red hair rival ???I did. And then the internet came along and other dummies did too haha
>>59684983>first memory of Pokemon I'm pretty sure I was 3 or 4, but I remember watching an episode of it on Kids WB. My next memory would be playing Yellow, probably a year later. Didn't touch Pokemon games again until Ruby.
>>59684983My first memory of Pokémon was when I was 5, incidentally tuning to an episode after kindergarten. I think it was the episode that introduced jigglypuff. That, alongside my friends showing off their Pokémon cards is what got me into the series. The best Christmas I 've ever had was me receiving a yellow Gameboy color and copies of gold and yellow versions. I'm old, man.
>>59685114Yes I am so glad that it was even my first vidya. Another memory of mine was buying a magazine that served as some sort of guide with story details and screenshots, I read it all the time + using action replay because the future dungeons were 2 hard 4 me. It’s still fun to play nowadays and I listen to the OST a lot.https://youtu.be/sUiChfaX7Vc
>2006-2007 maybe>only exposure to pokemon was anime and tcg, i loved drawing pokemon in my notebooks>aunt's husband installed a bunch of emulators on our family computer, roms included>play Silver for the first time, then stadium, then Emerald>father finally caves and buys a nintendo ds, but no original games only R4 >play through diamond for the first time and complete it>all I remember is being so excited about having my empoleon reach lvl 100 and waking up every day to check the swarms>also going to the mall to trade in the gts or get event pokemonFirst original game i had was X years later, but i still cherish those summer memories of going every day to the mall on my own, buying a soda and spending a couple of hours next to the fountain where the wifi connection was decent checking the gts
Rare quality thread, I’m glad I still go to 4chan to see stuff like this even though it’s not as often as I used to
>>59685061Are you a furry? I'm curious if MD being your first game shaped your development.
>>59685349I always try to bring a unique thread once in awhile
>>59685382Not really, I didn’t get a furry adjacent starter. Although it is true that I became more tolerant towards furries later on once I discovered that many of them enjoyed the game. I don’t mind them at all.
>>59685517>I didn’t get a furry adjacent starterSo you think it's possible that you'd be a furry now, if you had gotten a furry adjacent starter? Who did you end up getting, btw?
>>59684983My memory is shit, the best I can remember is bulbasaur was my first starter in Blue version and my first captured pokemon was named birdpoop because I was a literal child.Good thing I tried replaying red circa 2018-2019 and realized gen 1 is a steaming pile of ass with the benefit of hindsight.
>>59684983Hard to say. I think the first exposure i got of pokemon was the anime
>be me in 1999>two days after christmas>get record shop vouchers for christmas>go into town to see what's on sale in the after-christmas sales>buy a few CD's>give the Game Boy game shelf a quick glance>bright red box with an orange, vaguely dragon-shaped thing on the box>buy game on strength of the box blurb>get home and settled from town>begin playing Pokémon Red>become dimly aware at my mother screaming at me to come up out the room>check time>5 hours since I sat down>wat.png
>>59685061this was me, but with darkness. i got totodile on the quiz and didn't realize when i was asked for my name i was meant to put in my actual name, so i ended up putting "totodile" in instead>>59685382nta of course, but i have a similar outlook. i'm pretty furry tolerant but not one myself. idk if you'd consider totodile "furry adjacent" though.
>>59685591I cannot say for sure but I don’t think I’d have become one. I was exposed to the internet pretty late in my life (family banned tv so imagine being allowed to go to the computer), I was unaware of many things as I lived in my own secluded world. I discovered the existence of furries too late in my development for it to be impactful (15ish years old).I did imagine living in the PMD world but as a human. Chikorita was my starter, I never saw myself as one.>>59686209Totodile is a cool starter, we’re you happy with that starter? When I got mine I wasn’t, but I didn’t know you could reset the quiz by turning the console off so I sticked with it until the end.
>>59684983the first pokemon game i ever played was the fan game light platinumit was a very broken gba version of the game with cries that didn't even match the monsi remember blacking out often because i didn't know anything about the gameplay back theneventually i got softlocked at a spot and just decided to quit
>>59686595>Totodile is a cool starter, we’re you happy with that starter?i didn't really know what options were available, so i just stuck with it. grew to love the little bugger and was really happy to see i could choose him as a starter in my first mainline game, soulsilver. then ZA had to personally kick me in the dick 17 times in a row with toilet gatrthat said i at some point i used an action replay code to change my starter/partner from totodile/chimchar to, of all things, slugma/jigglypuff. i guess i just thought the lava slug was cool? slugma was still named "totodile". they still had their original movesets, though, so it was water gun slugma and flame wheel jigglypuff
It was seeing the cards at school, then the anime and then eventually playing smash 64 for the first time and getting red version in summer of 99. I cannot recollect what was the very first memory with pokemon though.
i started with those toys from capsule machines, lil bobblehead thingsthen i started diamond with a friend
>>59684983In Mexico, Pokemon was first and most popular because of the anime. No one was really that much into the games, as far as I can recall (also because games were an expensive hobby back then) Maybe some rich kids with N64s had Pokemon Stadium or whatever. So my first experience with Pokemon was watching the anime, back in 2000 when I was 5. I wasn't super into games back then, so I didn't even know Pokemon was a game franchise. I completely missed out on the GB-GBA era when it was brand new.Around 2005 or so I want to believe I first saw some rich kid at my school playing FireRed on his GBA SP but I really didn't think much of it. Then about 2006 when I first began having a PC at home, a neighbor showed me the VBA emulator and Pokemon Ruby. That was the first actual Pokemon game I got to play. Then that rich kid one day had a DS with FireRed and they allowed me to borrow it and I got to play it for the first time as well. I got a gamecube in 2005 with Melee, and yet still didn't really pay attention to the franchise.In 2007 my mom bought me a DS Lite and that's when I really began getting into the franchise. Got myself a bootleg FR cart, and soon after my first "real" fully original game was Explorers of Time (I had emulated Red Rescue on VBA during those Ruby days too)Then around that time I also got an N64, I'd grind the shit out of Stadium. (I didn't really knew what "gen" mechanics were back then and I thought Stadium worked just like gen 3 did)Finally, around 2009, my rich uncle gave me some money for christmas and I used it to get myself Pokemon Pearl, which was my first "real" original Pokemon game. Also got FR and Sapphire carts to fill up the dex.So I guess I'd say RSE was the "first experience" but the two games that really "defined" my childhood were Explorers and Pearl. Funny enough I just couldn't get into gen 5 and I was growing into that edgy teen phase, so I dropped Pokemon completely until SM brought me back into the franchise since.
Too many fucking zoomies ITT, no wonder this board is full of shit opinions.
>>59684983can't remember the first memory, but a few early ones>dropping brother off at golf practice with mom>playing brothers gameboy>find ditto>ask my brother if I should catch it>he says yesalso>camping with family>playing cousins gameboy>evolve his charmander named DR DRE into charmeleon>think it looks awesome>we're all hyped>we go play xmen in the arcadepretty sure thats the year I got my first yellow gameboy color with pokemon yellow for my birthday
>>59684983platinum on the r4 when i was 8aaaah, the memories...
>>59686776No, that's because you're gay millennialbro, go suck a rapidash
>>59686791DR DRE is a funny name
people who missed on pokemania should not even bother.
Fun topic, yay. IP's 30 years old so these stories will naturally be all over the place.As for me, an older cousin asking me to do the monotonous task of buying game coins to grab the game corner Scyther in Red. (Remember you couldn't buy 500 at a time until GSC!) But it was not fruitless for me as I got to see a lot of how the game worked, and learned about the level 23 evolved water types you could catch with the Super Rod in the lake on the Indigo Plateau path, so I knew I could snag an early Slowbro when I got my own cart. Venusaur, Pidgeot, and Slowbro are all I can remember using but you'd best believe I cloned those rare candies before the Elite Four. I've never power-leveled a starter, and I'm sure steamrolling the E4 that way is why. (Slowbro is still an inside joke among some family members to this day). Actually got Pinball before any of the Game Freak games, so I suppose I was jamming to Mesaze Pokemon Master at very young age. The TV series and TCG obviously came into play later.>>59685861Quite relatable.
>>59684983I saw commercials for Diamond and Pearl around the time I became sentient, but the first time I had any interest in it was with pic related when I was 9.>Millennial cousin grew up with Pokemania>Had this at his parents' house for years even after he lost interest in Pokemon>Would always see it in their toy closet at every family function>Finally got curious and asked what it was, he and I played the game for a while>I had such a fun time playing it that he gave it to me that very night>Still have it in my closet to this day>He gave me some of his other merch after that like those gold Happy Meal toys, but my dad threw them away many years agoThis game is the only reason why I remember basically every Gen 1 Pokemon. I didn't even play one of the actual games until Arceus came out, but I've been working my way through the DS games recently and enjoying them. I'm thinking about pulling it out again just to give it another shot with more seasoned eyes.
>>59688641I actually got to play a round of this earlier this year, first time in forever, I recall it being smooth sailing. The Elite 4 are designed to block you but that thankfully didn't happen.
vbump
>>59684983watching cartoon network early in the morning around 2008ish and seeing the pokemon anime, then my first pokemon game was explorers of darkness, then i got guardian signs, my first actual mainline game was bw lol, despite that i do not really like it in retrospect
>>59684983nicked this kids copy of platinum off him at a sleepover. within a year it got stolen from me when i foolishly trusted my bestie to bring it to school
>>59684983It was 1999 and I was turning 5 years old.Everything was pokemon; balloons, plates, decorations, stuffed animals, they even had those little pressed sugar decorations for cakes, and my cake had the 3 kantooooo starters.My whole class, all my friends, and even some kids from other classes showed up, it was a pretty big party desu.My dad was running around filming it on a big ass 90s cam corder, lol.I had a big slice, because I was 5 and wanted charmander's whole head and my wonderful parents liked to spoil me, so I did get the whole headAnd then for my gift my parents got me the gameboy color with a retro pokemon GBC sling bag, and my grandparents got me pokemon blue version! I could only read a little at that age and had to have my mom help me with some words, but I was so happy to be able to catch my pokemon and give them quirky names like in the movie. Best birthday I ever had, I played that game until I was like 10 and sapphire came out.
I grew up during Pokemania but I didn't have the games. My grandma used to buy me all kinds of dumb Pokemon merch so I knew a bunch of Pokemon stuff without owning my own game until gen 3. First time I actually played Pokemon was in the waiting room watching some other kid play on his gameboy, when he asked me if I wanted to play. So he let me beat a wild Pidgey with his Pikachu and that was it. I remember reading out loud how much EXP Pikachu gained and asking the kid if that is okay.
>>59689987Very cute memories, I remember doing a Pokémon party theme with friends from primary school. We’d play Pokémon all day. One of the kid’s mom made a Pokémon themed cake (which was just a cake with Pokémon figured out on top of it) and it was the coolest thing I’d seen a parent do. Your cake seemed even more awesome!
>>59690115*Pokémon figures on top of itMy faut for being a phoneposter
>>59684983May or June 2000, some classmates were talking about a new cartoon in TV. A few days later I caught the tail end of the Brock introduction ep (after the fight), then the Bulbasaur capture ep in full. And I was immediately hooked.Not many handhelds among eastern europoors at the time, so everyone that had a PC emulated the shit out of the first two gens. But the primary social focus was on the anime, and all the collectible tie-ins.
During the peak of the craze I was one of those poorfags who didn't have a Gameboy nor had access to the TCG so I was only an audience in school while all the cool kids had Pokemon RBYGSC and dem CharizardsAll I had was the cartoon, it wasn't until Firered/Leafgreen where I bought my first GBA SP AGS-101 around the time Diamond and Pearl were outI couldn't afford the DS even back then though I splurged for a DS Lite when Platinum came out
>>59684983underage b&
>>59690415Zoomers are 29
>>59690415you're a retread
>>59690428zoomers should be drawn and quartered for being younger than me
>>59684983Unironically it was this fight (May 2) in Emerald, the one everyone always says is terrifying, which is really only the case if you choose Mudkip and try to solo the game with it (which I did every time of course). Didn't know how to read either since I was 4 when the game came out, so once I gave up on the battle I'd have to restart my save. Good times.Got a lot of memories of playing D/P back then, too. My brother had an Action Replay so we'd battle our hacked legendaries against each other. I remember beating him once with some rando shitmon Steelix I caught from Victory Road cause he didn't understand the difference between physical and special moves kek.
>>59684983probably around 2012 or so. My brother had a single deck of the playing cards from the DP era but he was never that into it. I would quite often get out the rulebook that came with it because I thought it looked cool.A few years later the same brother entrusted me with a USB stick with a GBA emulator and about a dozen roms including some Pokemon games, Golden Sun, and Love Hina (though I never did get much out of the latter). I played Leaf Green, Crystal, and Emerald all the way through, but I remember playing the shit out of Emerald in particular.
>>59684983I think it was Pokemon Stadium and me watching the anime. I didn’t play a mainline game until Ruby on the GBA.
>>59684983Bubblebeaming the shit out of nugget bridge and thinking I had just unlocked the best move ever
>>59690572I have a mandela effect memory of grovyle knowing leaf blade in that fight and absolutely shitfucking my whole team with it
>>59684983I got Blue in the midst of Pokemania and then got a Game Boy Advance and Crystal Version on launch day and to this day playing with other kids during school holidays in Australia is one of the happiest times of my life. Gen 4 brought back some of that for me but I was just starting High School when it dropped and from then on less and less of my friends were playing Pokemon.Fast forward a few years and due to shit circumstances I was living in a bit of a flophouse with local delinquents living a day in day out bender of booze, drugs and partying in between going to school towards the tail end of Gen 5, where I met my current best friend of almost 15 years because we were two retards playing Black 2/White 2 during one of the parties.
>>59690178>>59686697putos
>>59691152>eastern europoors Illiterate ass nigga
>>59684983struggling through blue then my mons getting poisoned and i couldn't understand why my screen kept flickering so I reset the game
>>596849831999/2000 with the cartoon I was 4mum got me vhs tapes of episodes I got a pikachu remote control car and pokedex for my 6 birthday I didn't play the games until 2007 (I was a ps2 kid) was a Emerald rom
>>59684983Some kid on the school bus gave me a Mankey card he didn't want.
I've probably interacted with the IP much before, but since I was so young, dredging up those memories is difficult. My earliest memory involves bringing my brother's game boy pocket to elementary school. One of the older kids wanted to get rid of his copy of Red for unknown reasons, and me, being the idiot that I am, traded it for my brother's copy of Final Fantasy Legend. My brother, in junior high, was not happy after learning about this, but did enjoy the game. As did I at least with how much he let me play it.
In 6th grade a kid traded me his Game Boy and Red for a bunch of my Pokemon cards. His parents found out after a few weeks and we had to trade back, but I was hooked enough I mowed lawns that summer to save up money and buy my own. I remember my original team was Charizard, Vileplume, Muk, Lapras, Snorlax, and Pidgeot.
I was a Nintendo Power subscriber at the time. Even though I had internet via AOL at the time, video game magazines were still my go-to source for gaming news. Nintendo Power was obviously heavily promoting Red and Blue at the time, along with the upcoming anime, so that was where I got my first glimpse. I already had a Game Boy, and a Super Gameboy for my SNES (which made playing GB games so, so much better at the time), but as to why I asked my parents for it, I don't remember, only that I specifically asked for Blue version because of it being my favorite color. Maybe my friends were already into it, Idk, but I do remember some of them being heavily into TCG and others the video game itself, but I don't remember if that was before or after I got the game.
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>>59684983In 1999, my elder sister (she was 11 years, I was 6) bought me a TCG Base Set booster from the toys section of a department store. Neither of us really knew what Pokemon was at the time, but it was supposed to be this new cool thing (it was just arriving in Europe at the time). Then sometime later I caught the animated series on a Saturday morning, and occasionally also did after that, (but not regularly, because fuck man, not even cartoons can get me to wake up early). Also saw some of my kindergarten friends with TCG cards of their own, and some other local kids with Game Boys and Red/Blue version. I didn't get a Pokemon video game of my own until 2002, with a GBA for Xmas '01 and Crystal and Yellow versions the following year.I remember that first TCG pack having a holofoil Magneton.
>>59684983I got a poorly translated Silver when I was 11. Everything past the second town was difficult to read or just blank spaces. It was not even "engrish", just incoherent sentences replacing dialogues and moves that vaguely resembled the original.English is not my first language and that made it even more difficult.What do you mean Strength isn't called Vast Stu?
>>59698358That sounds different from Vietnamese Crystal
>>59698358It is a chinese silver, poorly translated to english. My first game was that kind of Gold - wanin, hinoa and chicor. Rage attack was named some dots and CG. Plus it was ver buggy, crashing when pokemon used protect and Erika in Kanto had 127 lvl Octillery.
>>59684983My mom had an old typewriter or word processor and I had this book so I'd type out Pokedex entries for fun. Ended up being helpful for me for computer time when I finally started school.
>>59699900Now that you said it I remember the starters having those names but limited to 5 characters.And the trainer house in viridian had six copies of the trainer sprite at level over 100 that only used surf, and the last one caused a crash.
ripoffs when I was in early HSfirst game was Conquest when I randomly decided to try out the game series
>>59684983it's a bit fuzzy but in the early 2000s my friend had a GBA and he let me play his copy of FireRed for a couple of hours, I vividly remember leveling up a Squirtle and catching a Pidgey and a Rattata, thought it was the coolest thing ever since my only experience with video games at the time was mostly watching my older brother beat PS1 platformers.
>>59684983Probably around 2009 or so, my cousin came to visit my older brother and let me play Pokémon Yellow on some mobile emulator or whatever that was, I got hooked on Pokémon for a while, watched the anime, got a proper emulator on my computer and finished Yellow, played Soul Silver because I fell in love with Lugia after watching the second movie and then played Platinum, but never got around to finish it at that time.
wonderful thread, thank you all for the warm feelingsi was 7 when my grandpa some-fucking-how found a GBC and a copy of yellow+the manual for 15 bucks from a garage sale for me. this was around 2008-9 so i imagine the owner must've gotten a ds and gen 4 or something. my family was very strict on tv and internet so i got to experience my own mini, distorted pokemania over the next couple years because the only other ways i interacted with the IP was from gen 1/2 memorabilia(figures, books describing anime episodes, vhs of mewtwo returns and pikachu's vacation) also found at garage sales. i have very distinct memories of being stuck on the E4 for a long time because i was too stupid to realize you could save/heal in between fights(although i still do this out of habit), how mad i was when my little sister deleted my save and trying to find gen 2/kanto mons excluded in yellow for hours because i didn't know there were any other pokemon games, let alone entire generations... at least until i got a ds, black and explorers of darkness for my birthday and the rest is history
i just hope big G gives me a chance to do it all over at the end. I'll do it right that time
