Pokemon Memories

[SparklingBlue]

With Pokemon Day falling this week, what are some of your favorite memories of Pokemon? Catch a Legendary in one try? A memorable anime episode? Pulling a rare card? Something else entirely? Share your memories here.

 

[K_S]

Well old soul that I am I wrangled with the fandom in its infancy, ala during the old "taboo" days. Where you were frisked for cards and gaming systems at.the door, the topic was banned, and the participents were seen as rabid,sacrilegious, gambling mad, anti-patriotic lunatics.

(Yes I lived somewhere that hidbound, and yes I had to argue against that retoric for anything not ozzing in americana from fifth grade to the end of highschool)

Anyway, the kids, myself included, looked at our unlistening elders and teachers, at each other, then after a few weeks broke click groups and struck treaties to make our own league. We had a set of gym leaders, trade days, and a "champion" for the card as well as the gameboy system that could be challenged if you got all eight badges. As well as some pre-arranged team rocket grunts who if they won, steal a badge.

I wound up running the fire gym from the school library.. And there was this one poor grass specialist who managed to win once before losing to our t.r. cosplayer and lost thier fire badge.... i gave out a sympathy badge for that one... but that was my fondest mon memory. Aiding and abbetting a covert schoolwide wide mon league under the suoerattendents nose.

 

[Dragonfree]

One of my fondest memories is the glitched Jolteon that I had on Yellow. Ever since he was an Eevee, his status screen was weird: every time I viewed this particular Pokémon's stats, the screen would initially go blank, and then if I pressed A again, it would appear as normal but with the OT name as well as the "OT/" and "IDNo/" labels missing. It looked like this, except that the ID number was 22166:



And the reason I have a screenshot to show you is that two decades later, despite that my Yellow save file and Jolteon with it were lost permanently when my cousin restarted the game in 2003, I managed to work out exactly what was going on there and recreate it on an emulator! Which was also a truly magical Pokémon moment.

Another great moment that sticks with me was when I was first analyzing the R/B/Y capture algorithm. It had been documented on at least one site before, but to my knowledge, nobody had documented wobbles. So when I was staring at the code that decided the wobble message, and I realized it was completely deterministic, so the ball would always wobble the same number of times if the capture failed, so long as the Pokémon's HP and status didn't change... and then I actually tried it and it was true and neither I nor anyone I'd seen had ever noticed... that was magic.

And it was also pure magic to perform the Mew trick for the first time in 2003. After years of false rumours, Pokémon fans had matured into accepting that there was absolutely no way to get Mew in-game other than using a cheating device or attending an official event. And then one day, along came this perfect, incredibly fake-sounding glitch, one that'd been circulating on low-traffic cheat websites for at least the better part of a year without getting any traction because the only people gullible enough to even try it were naïve kids, and it actually worked. Even having seen screenshots and explanations online already, knowing that it did work, actually doing it myself felt unreal.