Collection essentials #158 and #159: Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue (Game Boy)
“Pokémon” is short for “Pocket Monsters”, which is what the games were originally called in Japan, where they actually released two whole years (1996) before the rest of the world. By the time Pokémon was finally exported late in 1998, it didn’t merely have these two games for the world to jump into, but also a cartoon, a trading card game, and tons of merchandise with all the franchise’s very marketable monsters. The result was an incredible Pokémon craze that captivated the world’s youth for a couple years. If you were alive in the late ‘90s, it was almost impossible to escape Pokémon. It was EVERYWHERE. Even news stations couldn’t help but report on the fad, and there was some amusement seeing the series grow so huge that these adults who knew nothing about it and had no idea how to even pronounce the name were talking about it. One thing that was kind of remarkable about it is that 1998 was NINE years after the Game Boy first released in North America, which is a very long time in terms of video game generations, and yet Pokémon Red and Blue still managed to be the biggest and most iconic titles for the platform. (It certainly helped that the Game Boy’s successor came out around the same time and was backwards-compatible with the old cartridges)
So what is Pokémon and why is it successful? Since this post is specifically about the games, I’m gonna focus on those. Pokémon Red and Blue are RPGs, but not your typical RPG where you control some kind of weapon-wielding hero who goes around slaying monsters until he takes down the big bad villain. Your character in Pokémon never does any fighting at all. Rather, this is an RPG about catching, raising and using monsters who do all the fighting. The main objective of the game is to defeat all eight of the world’s “gym leaders” to earn the privilege to battle an elite group known as the “Elite Four” and then the world’s champion trainer, in order to win said title for yourself. Along the way you’ll thwart the plans of a criminal organization called Team Rocket, but otherwise this is not your typical RPG story, and for better or worse story isn’t really a major part of these games’ focus or appeal, unlike most RPGs.
There are 151 different species of Pokémon in these original games to catch and battle with. You are given one to start out with, and very quickly you will gain the ability to catch other Pokémon found in the wild. You can have a team of up to six with you at any given time. You are incentivized to have a diverse team, because each Pokémon has one or two “types” (such as “Fire,” “Water,” “Rock,” and 12 more) each of which have strengths and weaknesses. For example, you may start with the Fire-type Charmander, so you’ll want a Pokémon of a different type that can beat the Water-types that Charmander will struggle against. Combat is turned-based, with different species of Pokémon having different “stats” that determine how well they perform in battle, and access to a certain array of moves which can aim to defeat the opponent in a variety of ways.
Why are there two games here rather than one? The truth is that Pokémon Red and Blue are nearly identical. The difference is that there are some Pokémon that you can only catch in one of the two versions. You see, players can use a “link cable” to connect their Game Boys together in order to battle or trade Pokémon. From the start, this was intended to be a highly social game. Having version-exclusive Pokémon encouraged making friends and sharing the Pokémon that each player wouldn’t be able to acquire.
You’ll notice that I have the Japanese versions of these games as well; I don’t consider them essential but I felt I might as well include them. You may also see that there is an extra green Japanese cartridge here. This is because the two versions that Pokémon launched with in Japan were Red and Green. The Japanese Blue version came a little later and featured a series of tweaks to try and improve the games a little. The international releases are not quite 1-to-1 translations of the Japanese Red and Blue; they combine some elements of the Japanese Blue version with the original Red and Green versions. Poor Venusaur never got to be a box mascot overseas in Pokémon’s original generations.
A popular slogan for Pokémon when it first released stateside was “Gotta catch ‘em all!” You certainly didn’t need to catch a large variety of Pokémon in order to beat the games, but trying to catch them all was a big part of the appeal for many. Catching new monsters was exciting, and catching rare ones sometimes took a lot of effort (not to mention luck) that paid off with enormous satisfaction.
When Pokémon had the world under a spell from 1998-2000, there was a lot of speculation about how long the fad would last. Many predicted that after a little while, the hysteria would calm down and kids would grow up and move on to other things. That was only partially true, as it turns out. It’s true that after two or three years in the sun, Pokémon ceased to be as incredibly ubiquitous in pop culture as it had been. No game in the series would sell as many copies as Red and Blue did. However, the series never went away, still sold many millions with each new major release, and endured to become the most successful media franchise ever. This is a testament to how great of a job the creators did. The big wave of fans that brought Pokémon to relevance were mostly children, but Pokémon has the appeal and quality design to appeal to fans of all ages, so many of those kids stuck with it or went back to it as they got older rather than leave it behind forever. There’s a great diversity of designs among the Pokémon themselves, with many small cute monsters and big, ferocious, cool-looking ones and everything in between, so almost everyone can find some Pokémon that they like. The gameplay mechanics struck a sweet balance where it’s easy to learn the basics, but there’s lots of underlying complexity and depth, so competitive Pokémon battles can become an enthralling, hugely-strategic affair.
Not surprisingly, the Pokémon game formula was expanded upon and improved after Red and Blue. And even for the time and hardware, Red and Blue certainly aren’t perfect games, with graphics that could have been better and some gameplay mechanics that don’t quite work right or could have been thought out or implemented more effectively. But I do think that the fun of these games is pretty much intact in modern times. They’re still quite enjoyable, being easy to pick up and play, addictive, not overly slow and not overly difficult unlike older RPGs.
And now, finally, I can talk about my own experience. Having been born in 1990, I was the absolute perfect age to be hopelessly obsessed with Pokémon when the series left Japan. Since I was homeschooled, it took a few months before I discovered it which was longer than most kids, but once the cartoon, trading cards and games hit my eyes, I was hooked. When my baby sister was born in December 1999 and we were filming our first family home videos with her, my dad was introducing her (as if she understood) to us siblings and one of the first things he said about me was that “he loves Pokémon.” Sadly I couldn’t play the games for myself right away, as I lacked my own Game Boy. But I of course had friends who owned the games, so I relished every opportunity I had to try it out whenever I had the chance. Red and Blue actually weren’t the first games in the series I owned for myself (wait until tomorrow’s post), but before too long my mom was able to find a copy of Pokémon Red at a garage sale. Like many gamers of my generation, Pokémon Red and Blue are among the most nostalgic and significant video games from my youth. I could say even more about these games, but this post is long enough. It should be easy to tell that these games are the very epitome of collection essentials.
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