Game FreakMy first Pokémon was a Chikorita named Chicky, and I loved that tiny green horse with all my heart. I came to Pokémon a little later than many of my friends and colleagues, having lost Pokémon Red and Blue by not having a Game Boy, but I spent many hours watching others roam the scary little graveyard of Lavender Town or displaying Pikachu’s smile face in Pokémon Yellow.
I knew I wanted to be a part of this craze, so when I finally got my hands on a Game Boy Color, I made a point of telling my parents to give me Pokémon Gold. My youngest brother won Pokémon Silver and we share ownership of a Link Cable. Was a Magic Time.
At that time, I didn’t know much about type advantages – and I didn’t care much either. Pokémon, for most children, is a game in which you take a pet and make it fight other people’s pets, although it is a rudimentary understanding of the basic rock-paper-scissors triangle of “The fire the grass wins, the water wins the fire, the grass wins the water “it will take you very far, it gets a little more complex when you try to invent reasoning for the Bug Type by defeating the Psychic Type, or the Fighter Type defeating the Normal Type . It is best to just ignore all of these things and make sure you have lots of moves that hit you hard.
My dear Chicky was quickly joined by a number of other Pokémon that I kept mainly because they were cute. The Togepi you won at the beginning of the game was one of my favorites, called “Eggy” because children are terrible at inventing creative names. He had Metronome, a move that took randomly from all available moves, and although Metronome is no a good tactical Pokémon move, made my battles unexpected and surprising each time.
I also had a Mareep, called – points for hitting – “Sheepy”, and a Golduck, “Ducky”, in an attempt to fill my party with a little more force. My favorite of them all was – and still is – Swinub, the kind of pork slime that, let’s face it, I probably called it “Piggy”. I was incredibly disappointed when he turned into a big, ugly Piloswine, but at least that meant that we could be a little more fierce in the battle.
When I arrived at the seemingly endless maze of tunnels that formed Victory Road towards the final stage of the Pokémon League, I had a 70 Meganium (Chicky) level, plus the Ho-Oh I just picked up and my brother’s Lugia I made with let him change me because I am a terrible sister. My first time facing the Elite Four – well, it probably won’t be a surprise for you to know that my team, made up of Pokémon chosen for their cuteness, didn’t get very far.
Back on Victory Road to punch some Onixes, and a few hours later – still without joy. I spent all my money on Revives and Hyper Potions, but I barely had time to use them among the elite moves of an Elite Four hit-kill. It didn’t look great for my team – we were being eliminated, over and over again, and I couldn’t help but imagine each of the Elite Four seeing this stupid kid come into his room over and over and feel a little sorry for me. But I was not going to give up. This was an era before “playing something else” was an option. This was my game, and I was going to to knock this, even if it took forever.
It’s time to get serious, then. Signage montage music.
At that time, the only way to find out information about a game was to beg my parents for half an hour on the internet, and since we were using the dial-up modem that used the phone lines, it took a while. much convincing. It was expensive and meant that we couldn’t receive or make calls, so it was also inconvenient. In that half hour, I would try to find all the information I could on Ask Jeeves, the pre-Google search engine developed around a butler, and print it on huge bundles of paper (also expensive, also inconvenient).
Armed with my new knowledge, a ton of supplies and my brother’s level 70 Feraligatr (for which I traded him a Magikarp – sorry), I was finally ready to climb these steps like Rocky.
Finally, painfully, I passed by Champion Lance, only to be greeted by Professor Carvalho. Hey! I know that guy from TV! The Pokémon anime was super popular at the time, so the excitement of being greeted by a genuine celebrity in the Hall of Fame was almost most exciting than actually getting there. It is a pity that there were no screenshots at that time, because I would like to have evidence of my dear and sweet Chicky being celebrated as a champion.
But that was not the last surprise that Pokémon Gold had for me. The amazing thing about playing before the internet took over all of our lives is that we had no idea what was reserved. Spoilers were a rarity, and most were communicated through false rumors in the playground, such as being able to obtain the Triforce in Ocarina of Time, or that there is a mysterious pyramid in the Gerudo Desert. So when Pokémon Gold ran out, just to reveal … a whole new world to explore, was one of the greatest moments of my young life.
I had lost Pokémon Red and Blue, but Kanto had just opened up to me like a blooming flower, allowing me to try a scaled-down version of the original game, with gym badges and everything.
The incredible post-game secret of a whole second world, I would discover later, was thanks to Satoru Iwata, the former president of Nintendo whose legacy has impacted my life in more ways than I could ever imagine. His unexpected death came just a few months after the closing of the Official Nintendo Magazine – my first job in game journalism – and the world seemed worse because of it. He was a creative visionary and a genius programmer whose efforts to teach Game Freak how to pack Pokémon Gold and Silver left enough space in the cartridge for Kanto, an addition that basically saved the Pokémon series.
There are few people in this world that I mourn for the loss, even though I never met them. Steve Irwin is one of them. Satoru Iwata is another. I miss his irreverent appearances on Nintendo Direct and discover that he used to be the person behind some of Nintendo’s best business decisions. Iwata didn’t work for Game Freak, or even Nintendo, when he helped Pokémon Gold and Silver – he was at HAL Laboratory, working on Kirby and Earthbound – but it was because of him that the games arrived in the West, and Kanto was added to the map, both figuratively and literally.
I started Pokémon Gold as a kid who just wanted to get into a video game craze, but I ended up as a Pokémon fan forever. I could never have predicted that the game would give me much more than I expected, nor that it would still be sending waves all my life. I didn’t even expect to end 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 usually remember my time with Chicky, the plant horse. No Pokémon game since then has managed to reproduce the feeling of bonding with my first Starter. Since then, I have won almost all Elite Four, Pokémon League and Champion, usually with a similar group formed by my Starter, the first bird Pokémon I caught, the game’s Legendary and a selection of strong backups. But that incredible feeling of discovering that the world was twice as big as you imagined … is a unique sensation in life. Pokémon Gold was the beginning of my journey through the Pokémon world, but it also allowed me to experience what I missed. What a fantastic game.