ShareThis
You know, I haven’t always played Pokemon games. You see, I think the first game in the series that I even owned personally and legitimately was Pokémon Pearl. I never had any of the other ones. But I did have some exposure to the games, of course, not only with the intense media campaign that Nintendo threw out during the games’ initial release, but also in the peace of my own home. Sort of.
See, this one year, whilst I was in college, working on the most important studies for my Communication degree, it so happened that the campus book store decided to start selling used video games. This wasn’t quite as big of a business back then as it is now, but conversely, almost anyone could do it, so it didn’t seem weird that a place that normally charged you eighty dollars for a textbook that probably cost eighty-five cents to make would charge you twenty bucks for a video game that would normally cost you… twenty bucks.
Hey, wait a minute! That is WAY too fair a price for the bookstore at my particular college! Rumor had it the store was founded by Eva Braun.
Anyway, one of the guys in my frat house ended up working a shift at the bookstore, and he noticed it somehow had a large complement of Pokemon games. So much that he strongly suggested that several of the guys in my frat house, who were still busy playing Starcraft on our recently-installed ethernet completely state-of-the-art WIRED network, decided to take a few weeks off to explore the possibilities.
Now, rumor has it that these guys paid far, far less than sticker price for these five or six different Pokémon games, but I couldn’t tell you for certain as I was far too busy playing through Xenogears to take part. Plus, I hadn’t owned a Game Boy since 1992, anyway. Keep in mind, this was also when Game Boys took four whole double-A batteries to run and weighed a total of fifteen pounds.
Then, it so happened that nearly the entire house was consumed with catching ’em all, save for myself, as we have previously established. One guy even bought Pokémon Stadium, since he already had an N64 for and all, and we had many a tournament with said monsters. I, of course, not having my own Game Boy or ill-gotten copy of the game(s), had to make do with the system-produced Jigglypuffs in order to dominate, but since Jigglypuff is a finely-focused killing machine, as we all know, this was hardly a challenge.
Of course, now that I’m into the games more intently, no one else seems to care, despite the fact that Pikachu is letting is get more actively into the games with items like the Pokéwalker and infrared sensors. Sure, I may have missed out on the old Pokémon games, but I also missed out on having to plug in a cable to trade monsters, so I think it’s an even trade. Plus, I drank just as much beer in college as anyone else. More, probably, so there!
