Gotta Catch'em All
I remember when Pokemon fever swept my school. I didn't know what these "Pocket Monsters" were and I didn't care. Trading cards were banned at my school and as a member of Student Council, one of the duties I was tasked with was writing up any student bringing in this contraband, mostly Magic: The Gathering cards. Pretty soon it was mostly Pokemon cards being smuggled onto campus. I didn't understand it. Awhile later I was at a friend of a friend's house and an older boy was sitting on the couch with some sort of portable videogame system. I inquired what he was playing and he told me he was busy trying to "get a Jigglypuff", I was intrigued at what could be so fascinating.
That Christmas I asked my parents for a Game Boy Color and Pokemon Red. I was hooked at "Hello there! Welcome to the world of POKÉMON!" I played it obsessively and soon found a group of kids after-school, as equally fanatic over this videogame battle with. When I went off to summer camp, I brought my Gameboy and made new friends that way. I resolved to keep my fandom in check and swore off getting snared into the expensive world of trading cards. Awhile later however, knowing I liked "this pokemon thing" my grandmother got me a pack of Pokemon trading cards; initially, I did refused to open the pack but I caved in and found a hologram/foil Moltres card staring back at me. It was all over after that, pretty sound I was hoarding cards too! Still, my first love was the videogames. I found out about a Pokemon mall tour and dragged my parents and another occasion my grandparents to it - the big draw was a chance to get the legendary Pokemon, Mew transferred to your game cartridge. By this time I had definitely reached Cavichhi's definition of an "obsessed fan".
After playing and playing and replaying the game, filling my Pokedex and capturing them all, rumors about a blue Pikachu were all the rage around the playground. I read every videogame magazine I could get my hands on to find out more but soon realized that printed material was just too outdated, I had to go to the source. Before search engines were the de facto way to access information, web users relied on "portals" with carefully vetted links. That's how I discovered fan-fiction and pretty soon, I was staying up all night to read the latest PokeMorphs (mix of Pokemon and Animorphs) stories. Then at the speed of dial-up modem and in the pre-social network era, the Internet blew up in anticipation of the release of Pokemon Gold / Silver in Japan. I asked my grandfather to use his dot matrix printer to print "something for school" so I could study the character sprites for all the upcoming Pokemon.
I scoured the Internet and scored a Japanese ROM of Pokemon Silver that had been 20% translated to English and saved it on a 3½ floppy disk. One of my friends had a Pentium II desktop computer, which was the only machine accessible to me that was powerful enough to handle emulating the ROM. We'd play it together, doing our best to get around the language barrier and progressed about halfway through by the time the North American release of the game finally came. When I got to high school, I stopped playing, it was no longer cool, stopped wearing my "Gotta Catch'em All" t-shirts and I no longer found the "grinding" / leveling up process in the games fun. The last time I dusted off a Pokemon game, was Pokemon Stadium for the N64 when my ex-girlfriend noticed it was in my collection and wanted to give it a go for old times sake. The end of my life as a Pokemon master, the end of my fandom.
