Game FreakMy first Pokémon was a Chikorita named Chicky, and I loved that little green horse with all my heart. I came to Pokémon a little later than many of my friends and peers, because I missed Pokémon Red and Blue by not owning a Game Boy, but I spent many hours watching others wander around Lavender Town’s creepy graveyard. or with Pikachu’s smiling pomp. face in Pokémon yellow.
I knew I wanted to be a part of this craze, and when I finally got my hands on a Game Boy Color, I told my parents to get me some Pokémon Gold. My brother got Pokémon Silver and we shared the ownership of a Link cable. It was a magic time.
At the time, I did not know much about type benefits – nor did I really care. For most kids, Pokémon is a game where you get a pet and fight it with other people’s pets, and although a basic understanding of the basic rock paper scissors triangle of “Fire beats Grass, Water beats Fire, Grass beats Water “will get you quite far, it gets a little more complicated if you try to reason for Bug Type beating Psychic Type, or Fighting Type beating Normal Type. It’s best to just ignore all those things, and make sure you have a lot of movements that hit hard.
My dear Chicky quickly got a bunch of other Pokémon that I mostly kept because they were cute. The Togepi you gifted early in the game was one of my favorites, named ‘Eggy’, because kids come up with terribly creative names. He had Metronome, a move that randomly pulled out of 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, with the name – points to guess right – ‘Sheepy’, and a Golduck, ‘Ducky’, in an attempt to fill my party with a little more power. My favorite of all was – and still is – Swinub, the kind of pork slime I, probably, we can really call ‘Piggy’. I was incredibly disappointed when he turned into a big ugly Piloswine, but that at least meant we could be a little fierce in the fight.
By the time I reached the seemingly endless maze of tunnels that formed Victory Road after the final step of the Pokémon League, I had a level 70 Meganium (Chicky), plus the Ho-Oh I just caught, and Lugia of my brother whom I made him exchange because I’m a terrible sister. My first time tackling the Elite Four – well, it would probably not surprise you to hear that my team, made up of Pokémon chosen for their cuteness, did not get very far.
Back to Victory Road to hit some Onixes, and a few hours later – still no joy. I spent all my money on Revives and Hyper Potions, but I barely had time to squeeze it between the Elite Four’s elite one-on-one stroke moves. It did not look good to my team – we wiped out again and again, and I could not help but imagine that each of the Elite Four sees this idiot kid coming into their room again and again and does not feel a little sorry for me. But I did not want to give up. It was an era before “playing something else” was an option. It was my game, and I would go knock that, even if it lasted forever.
Time to get serious, then. Cue montage music.
At the time, the only way to find out information about a game was to beg my parents for half an hour on the Internet, and because we used the dial-up modem that used the phone lines, it had a very of convinced. It was expensive, and it meant we could not receive or make phone calls, and it was also uncomfortable. In half an hour I would try to find all the information on Ask Jeeves, the Google search designed for a butler, and print it in large pieces of paper (too expensive, too inconvenient).
Armed with my newfound knowledge, a bunch of supplies and Feraligatr’s level 70 from my brother (for which I traded him a Magikarp – sorry), I was finally ready to run up the stairs like Rocky.
Eventually, painfully, I passed champion Lance, only to be greeted by Professor Oak. Shark! I know the guy from the TV! The Pokémon anime was super popular at the time, so the thrill of being greeted by a sincere celebrity in the Hall of Fame more exciting than actually making it there. It’s a shame that screenshots did not exist at the time, because I wish I had evidence of my sweet, sweet Chicky being celebrated as a champion.
But this was not the last surprise Pokémon Gold had for me. The amazing thing about playing games before the internet took over our entire lives is that we had no idea which was in the store. Spoilers were a rarity, and most were communicated by untrue playgrounds, such as obtaining the Triforce in Ocarina of Time, or that there was a mysterious pyramid in the Gerudo Desert. When Pokémon Gold ended, just to reveal … a whole new world to explore, it was one of the greatest moments of my young life.
I missed Pokémon Red and Blue, but Kanto opened me up like a blooming flower and made me experience a scaled-down version of the original game, gym badges and all.
The wonderful after-game secret of a whole second world, I would later discover, was thanks to Satoru Iwata, the former president of Nintendo whose legacy has affected my life in more ways than I can ever know. His unexpected death occurred just a few short months after the closure of Official Nintendo Magazine – my first job in gaming journalism – and the world looks worse for it. He was a creative visionary and ingenious 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 few people in this world that I regret about the loss, even though I never knew them. Steve Irwin is one of them. Satoru Iwata is another. I miss his reverent Nintendo Direct appearance, and to realize that he was often the person behind some of Nintendo’s best business decisions. Iwata did not work for Game Freak, or even Nintendo, when he helped with Pokémon Gold and Silver – he was at HAL Laboratory and working on Kirby and Earthbound – but it was because of him that the games came to the West, and Kanto was added figuratively and literally to the map.
I started Pokémon Gold as a kid just wanting to go on a video game, but I ended up being a lifelong Pokémon fan. I could never have predicted that the game would give me as much as I expected, nor that it would give me wrinkles all my life. I did not even expect to finish this piece with a tribute to Iwata, but almost six years after his loss, his story lives on in my fond memories of his work.
I often think of my time with Chicky, the plant horse. No Pokémon game has since managed to replicate the feeling of bond with my very first Starter. I have since beaten almost every Elite Four, Pokémon League and Champion, usually with a similar party consisting of my Starter, the first Pokémon I caught, the legendary game and a variety of strong backups. But that wonderful feeling of discovering that the world was twice as big as you realized … it’s a one-time feeling. Pokémon Gold was the beginning of my journey through the world of Pokémon, but it also made me experience what I also missed. What a fantastic game.