Retro sundays and pokemon blue

I have lots of fond memories with pokemon blue. I first got it in 1999 during super bowl 33(broncos against the falcons). I could have sworn I got it 1 or 2 months after it came out but I was wrong. Anyways I remember the superbowl because me and my dad were at best buy and of course the game was on all the tvs(we went during half time) and every employee was watching. A funny thing happened when the manager came by to check on everyone. All the employees scattered like cockroaches and some even ran. I vividly remember playing gex for months before I got pokemon blue. I hyped myself up a lot from nintendo power and other magazines but mainly NP. They had pokemon power pull outs that were mini guides scaled down to monthly morsels. Looking at the guides(which I still have) I would plan out who I would pick as my first pokemon and who would be my 2nd and 3rd and so on. I imagined my team would destroy all comers with my high level pokemon. At times I couldn't take the waiting(I was saving my money to buy it) so I attempted to make my own maps of the kanto cities with computer paper.


With meager drawing skills I decided to just use my pokemon power guides instead. The faithful superbowl day I literally could not sleep the night before. I was very lucky to get the last copy(red was sold out) and on the drive home I was wishing my dad drove a little bit faster although reading the manual did help pass the time(remember those?). We got home at night and since I had a gameboy pocket I had to use a table lamp that casts a pretty big glare. I could not believe I was finally playing this game and it was all mine. Every day for the next few months I would play before and after school and sometimes during school such as lunch. That game ruled the playground as the current big thing. I battled and traded with my friends(who I am still friends with to this day) after school and we all discussed various rumors such as the truck by the S.S. Anne and the grass in pallet town. Our imaginations would go crazy with all stories we heard from a cousin or friend who works at nintendo. Some of us even tried to impress girls by turning up the volume of the battle music but they weren't really into the games.

One day I was at a party at my cousin's house when a partygoer(he was my age) asked me if I liked pokemon and if he can show me a cool trick. No it was not sexual, he showed me the missingo clone items trick and from that moment on. I could not unlearn it and I felt like having an unlimited amount of anything in that game was a perversion beyond what my child brain could comprehend. At little bit later on word got around in the playground that you can clone a pokemon by using a glitch during trading. That spread like crying kids and eventually I got the majority of the pokedex filled out this way.

As we got older we lost interest in the games and moved onto trying to get a girlfriend or trying to see a girl's boobs like most kids do as we go through puberty. (there was a girl in our class that would get with guys just to flash them but that is another story). I played my pokemon blue on and off but I never forgot about it. I still have my super bowl edition copy and I recently had to start a new game because I wanted to re-experience that part of my childhood. It still works great although I fear the battery may die anytime soon therefore erasing all my data. I still have the same extreme green gameboy pocket as back then so the nostalgia is pretty powerful. I really wish we didn't have to grow up and grow old and I would give anything to time travel but alas I'll just play my pokemon blue while never forgetting the memories a simple game can provide