What Pokemon Means to Me

It feels strange to be a 28 year old lawyer typing that title. First Corinthians 13:1 comes to mind: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” (NIV). With all respect to St. Paul and the Corinthians, I can’t put the Pokemon series behind me. Nor do I want to. I am a nostalgic person and the 25th anniversary of the release of Pokemon Red and Green in Japan (ported to the US as Red and Blue) only brings this out in force to a series I love. But I’ve never thought seriously about why the series resonates me and the anniversary encourages me to. Perhaps being isolated under pandemic-quarantine is a factor too. I haven’t bought a Pokemon game since 2010, which itself was five years after my last purchase. I’ve clocked far more hours on Assassins Creed or Halo in that time. I have lived in 5 states and graduated from three schools. I do not own a game system that could play a modern Pokemon game. Yet, here I am using my Saturday night to blog my affection for it. In part, I blame Post Malone because his iteration fo Hootie and the Blowfish’s “Only Wanna Be With You” for the anniversary really, as the kids say, slaps.

For those who don’t know what Pokemon is, the short version is that it is a Nintendo-adjacent video game where you collect and train digital creatures to fight. These creatures, the titular Pokemon, come in various types and rarities. The combat can best be described as rock paper scissors of types; fire beats grass, grass beats water, water, beats fire. I The original games for the Game Boy spawned 7 more “generations“ of games, an ongoing anime show, movies, and a trading card game. There were 150 original Pokemon; each successive generation has added more Pokemon and types.

I imagine that you’ve heard of Pikachu. He is an electric type, so intuitively he is good against water-types and counter-intuitively he is bad against ground-type.

(In fairness to Pikachu, he has slimmed down over the years and has more favorable drawings, but this will always be my Pikachu)

With 386 million copies sold, perhaps I do not need to explain what Pokemon is; but I also wouldn’t be surprised if many don’t know what it is beyond being a reason a bunch of Millennials and Xenials were roaming parks in 2015 glued to their phones. Needless to say, they got me early. I do not have a 25 year history with Pokemon, but pretty close. Pokemon Blue and Red came to North America in 1998 and I am pretty sure I got it almost immediately. I lived in a little town in NW Pa called Warren and Pokemon was a big deal, as I assume it was everywhere. This was my broadest period of fandom; I had the game, collected the cards, and watched the TV show. It was a huge part of my friendship with my best friend Blair and I’m sure our parents constantly wondered why they bothered bringing us to each other’s houses just to sit and only occasionally talk while we stared at our Game Boys. One of the first tragedies in my life was when we ruined my Pokemon Blue by removing it from his Game Boy with the leverage of a screwdriver. I still own to this day the Pokemon Red that my kind mom replaced it with. Relatedly, I also first learned that kids can be assholes from the trading card game when some older kids down the road duped me into trading some of my better/favorite cards for Japanese cards which were, though cool, indecipherable and thus impossible to play with.

This is not a unique story and you may be looking at your watch and thinking “So what, he liked pokemon when he was in elementary school, I expected more emotion.“ Well, as a lawyer I need to make it clear that I did made not representations that you should care and will not be held responsible for your enjoyment quality. But it picks up from here.

I mentioned above that I have moved a lot since 2010; that is a symptom of a “problem“ that started around the same time as Pokemon graced my life. I have moved a ton. Warren was my second city/town, but moving from Pittsburgh to Warren at age 4 was not anything notable. Moving again at 7; that was a bit more influential. We moved to Alpena, Michigan, which for you map-types is nowhere close to Warren, PA. In fact, Alpena is and was not close to really anything. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Alpena and still do, but when the regional hub is the 15,000 person town you live in, you do a good bit of traveling. And travel we did; 4 and 6 hours to grandparents, 3 hours to Traverse City and the Upper Peninsula. One might think I would hate this change, but I really didn't. I was a pretty flexible kid and still had Pokemon. Pokemon was my constant, strange to say. A new generation, Gold and Silver, came out the same year that we moved and the love carried on. Back in those days (and for some time after) Game Boys did not have back lit screens. Because parents prefer to not have bright lights in the back seat while driving dark Michigan roads, I had a tiny little light that illuminated my screen. No wonder my eyes are so poor. My parents never heard complaints that we were going on a trip; it was an excuse to play Game Boy. A ton of my durable memories from this time are in a dark back seat playing Pokemon while Matchbox 20 or Alison Krauss played.

I played several other games, but Pokemon really was the no. 1 option. Beyond it imprinting early, I suppose it was because it was easy to understand but still somewhat challenging and the world-creation appealed to a quiet thoughtful kid that liked to read. “What level does my Pidgey evolve? Where do I find better poke balls? What can steel type beat?” The answer to the last question is Ice-type, if you’re curious. It was an immersive world, but one that could be dropped and restarted anytime. You grow attached to your team that you work so hard to grow in strength and size. Each new generation built on top of the same formula and many of the same pokemon, but in a new world to explore.

It was my comfort zone and I’m sure in some ways that was frustrating to my parents that i was content to just play Pokemon or read when they wanted me to do other things, like snowmobile or actually go on playdates, but they were pretty patient. I did both, but to be honest, I'd rather be playing Pokemon or reading. This safe space came in handy in 2004. I will endeavor to not get too personal here, but 2004 sucked for my family. In the space of a June week, my grandfather was diagnosed with terminal cancer and my father suffered a debilitating hand injury that ended his career as a surgeon. The rest of the year was a year of constant motion. By the next January, I was in a new school in Chattanooga, TN. My parents did a great job shielding us from the worst, but also including us in what was going on, to the extent you can with 11 and 9 year olds. Pokemon didn’t “save me“ but in hindsight it was a huge part in getting through. It ensured there were fun hours in weekly trips to Detroit or Ann Arbor. It provided an escape in my grandparents basement while the adults talked upstairs about lives where the floor had seemingly dropped away and we were in free fall.. The new Gameboy I got was a lifeline i didn’t know I had. Pokemon was my zen when I did not know I needed one.

Thus far I have omitted a huge part of my connection to Pokemon, so I would remiss to wait longer to bring it, or rather her, into the story. I have a younger sister Erin and Pokemon was just about the only thing we had a shared interest in. I love my sister very much (and like her most of the time, haha) but I am pretty sure that that was not apparent to the world for most of our childhoods. To say we fought incessantly sounds like an understatement. There were numerous reasons why, whether known then, now, or never, we just couldn’t get along, but one reason might just be proximity. After we moved from Warren, we spent a ton of time as a family together. I liked that and I think she did too, but like two grindstones that are fairly similar but have dips and bumps in a few places that didn’t match, we constantly grated each other. Pokemon was both a solution and an aggravation to this. It was pretty much the only thing we could both talk about and liked. 90s Disney movies? I was meh. Lord of the Rings movies? Erin couldn’t tell a hobbit from an orc. We commiserated over Pokemon we caught, what badges we had, or what areas we were in. We would do this in the backseat of the car during the aforementioned travel, but also just sitting around the house. However, this shared interest also created fights over finite goods. Whether because I was older or because I was mildly more into the games, I usually got the games first and Erin got the, for lack of a better term, hand-me-downs. I do recall she had her own games sometimes—I particularly remember her having Silver version to my Gold—but after a first play through, each game became sort of part of a shared collection. Despite having moved on from games, I could get irrationally possessive, and that sometimes went the other way too. Game Freak and Nintendo did our family a great disservice my only allowing one save file on a game at a time. I cannot count the number of times one of us, particularly me, got furious that the other had saved over their game and started anew.

Looking back, I really appreciate this shared experience with my sister, despite the friction it caused. It still gives us a common cultural topic to talk about. Alpena was definitely the zenith of my Pokemon days (though by no means the end, as you’ll see below) but she and I were having these same fights and conversations over game-sharing in 2012 at a beach house in Northport.

After we moved from Alpena, I stopped being an active fan of the ongoing series and rather remained a fan of the series as I knew it. Dumb things like football, middle and high school, and Tennessee life in general got in the way. I skipped a whole generation of games entirely; I call myself a fan but couldn’t tell you a damn thing about Pokemon Diamond or Pearl. But I returned to Pokemon Red/Gold/Ruby periodically; after all, there were still grandparents to visit and the ups and downs of life to escape for a bit from. Oddly, and slightly embarrassingly, enough, a few of my friends got into the new release in our last 18 months of high school year. I have a particularly vivid memory of a bunch of 17 year old dudes in some room at a friends house just playing Pokemon Black and talking about it like it was the most intellectual thing in the world. As someone who took basically my whole middle and high school tenure to collect actual solid friends, here was Pokemon emerging again as part of that process. In college, Pokemon popped up again, this time through emulation of the games of our youths on our school computers. This was just one part of the nonsense my friends and I did to pass the time, but memorable enough that it came up on a recent Zoom happy hour.

Thats the main reason I think I am writing this blog today. Sometimes you just need to return to constants in your life and aside from my family, upon some reflection Pokemon is the dominant one. On a lark, I dug up my Game Boy XP this morning and blew the dust out of my Pokemon Red. I can’t help but still love the game, even realizing how much future generations improved the mechanics. I picked Charmander, the fire lizard, of course and away we went.

My sister and I (as Charmeleon) circa 1999