Game FreakMy first Pokémon was a Chikorita named Chicky, and I loved that little green horse thing wholeheartedly. I got to Pokémon a little later than many of my friends and classmates, after losing red and blue Pokémon for not owning a Game Boy, but I spent many hours watching others stroll through Lavender’s creepy little cemetery. Town or showing Pikachu’s smile. towards Yellow Pokémon.
I knew I wanted to be a part of this fashion, so when I finally got a Game Boy Color, I made sure to tell my parents to get me Pokémon Gold. My little brother got Pokémon Silver and we shared ownership of a Link Link. It was one magical time.
Back then, I didn’t know much about the benefits of the type, and I didn’t care either. Pokémon, for most children, is a game where you get a pet and fight other people’s pets, although a rudimentary understanding of the basic stone-paper-scissors triangle of “The fire beats the grass, the water beats the fire, the grass beats the water “will take you quite far, it becomes a little more complex when you try to raise reasoning about the type of error that exceeds the psychic type or the type of struggle that exceeds the normal type. It’s best to ignore all of these things and make sure you make lots of moves that play hard.
To my beloved Chicky was quickly added a number of other Pokémon that I mostly kept because they were cute. The Togepi they give you at the beginning of the game was one of my favorites, called “Eggy,” because the kids have a terrible creative name. It had Metronome, a move that came out at random from all available moves, and although Metronome is no a good tactical Pokémon move, which made my battles unexpected and amazing every time.
I also had a Mareep, called – points to guess correctly – “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 pig slime that, let’s be real, I probably called “Piggy”. I was incredibly disappointed when he became a big ugly Piloswine, but at least that meant we could be a little fiercer in battle.
When I reached the seemingly endless maze of tunnels that formed Victory Road towards the last pass of the Pokémon League, I had a level of 70 Meganium (Chicky), plus the Ho-Oh I had just picked up and my brother’s Lugia . which made him change me because I am a terrible sister. The first time I tackled the Elite Four – well, you probably won’t be surprised that my team, made up of Pokémon chosen for their tenderness, didn’t get too far.
Back on Victory Road to hit some Onyxes and a few hours later, there is still no joy. I spent all my money on Revives and Hyper Potions, but I barely had time to use them among the elite moves of Elite Four in one fell swoop. It didn’t look great to my team – they were eliminating us over and over again, and I couldn’t help but imagine that each of the Elite Four saw this silly idiot come into their room over and over and feel a little sorry for me. But he was not about to give up. This was a time before “playing something else” was an option. This was my game, and I was going there beat even if it has taken forever.
It’s time to get serious, then. Cue musical montage.
Back then, the only way to find out information about a game was to ask my parents for half an hour on the Internet, and since we were using the dial-up modem that used the phone lines, we had to a lot to convince. It was expensive, and meant we couldn’t receive or make phone calls, so it was also awkward. In that half hour, I would try to find all the information I could about Ask Jeeves, the pre-Google search engine designed for a butler., and print it on large pieces of paper (also expensive, also awkward).
Armed with my recent knowledge, lots of supplies and my brother Feraligatr’s level 70 (for which I traded him a Magikarp, I’m sorry), I was finally ready to climb those steps like Rocky.
Finally, painfully, I passed the Lance Champion, only to be greeted by Professor Oak. Hey! I know this guy from TV! The Pokémon anime was very popular at the time, so the excitement of being greeted by a real celebrity at the Hall of Fame was almost month exciting to really get there. It’s a shame that the screenshots didn’t exist at the time, because I’d like to have proof that my beloved and sweet Chicky was being celebrated as a champion.
But that wasn’t the last surprise Pokémon Gold had for me. The amazing thing about playing games before the Internet took over our lives is that we had no idea what was in the store. Spoilers were a rarity, and most were communicated through false playground rumors, such as being able to get the Triforce at Ocarina of Time, or having a mysterious pyramid in the Gerudo Desert. So when Pokémon Gold ran out, only to reveal … a whole new world to explore, was one of the greatest moments of my young life.
I had lost red and blue Pokémon, but Kanto had just opened up to me like a flowery flower, allowing me to experience a reduced version of the original game, gym badges, and all.
After discovering, the incredible post-game secret of a whole second world was thanks to Satoru Iwata, the former president of Nintendo, whose legacy has impacted my life in many more ways than I can ever know. His unexpected death came a few months after the closure of the official Nintendo magazine, my first job in gaming journalism, and the world seemed worse. He was a visionary and brilliant creative programmer, whose efforts in teaching Game Freak to compress Pokémon Gold and Silver left enough space in the cartridge for Kanto, an add-on that basically saved the Pokémon series.
There are few people in this world who mourn the loss, even though they never know it. Steve Irwin is one of them. Satoru Iwata is another. I miss his irreverent appearances on Nintendo Direct and find out that he was often the person behind some of Nintendo’s best commercial decisions. Iwata didn’t work for Game Freak, not even for Nintendo, when he helped Pokémon Gold and Silver (he was at HAL Laboratory, he worked at Kirby and Earthbound), but it was for him that the games reached the West and Kanto. was added to the map, both figuratively and literally.
I started Pokémon Gold when I was a kid who just wanted to get into a video game craze, but I ended up being a lifelong Pokémon fan. I would never have been able to predict that the game would give me far beyond what I expected, nor that it would continue to send waves throughout my life. I didn’t even expect to finish this piece with a tribute to Iwata, but almost six years after his loss, his story lingers in my fond memories of his work.
I often remember my time with Chicky, the vegetable horse. No Pokémon game has managed to replicate the feeling of bonding with my first Starter. Since then I’ve won almost every Elite Four, Pokémon League and Champion, usually with a similar party consisting of my Starter, the first Pokémon bird I caught, the Legendary of the game and a selection of strong backups. But that amazing feeling of discovering that the world was twice as big as you’d realized … is a unique feeling. Pokémon Gold was the start of my journey through the world of Pokémon, but it also allowed me to experience what I had missed. What a fantastic game.