Your First Pokemon Game

[The REAL Joey]

Considering how long the series has spanned, there's no doubt people of all ages who started on different generations.

So here's the question. Which Pokemon game was your first?

I still remember mine as clear as day. It was a Christmas and I remember unwrapping a present to be greeted with the sight of Pokemon Blue. Needless to say, my family didn't hear a peep out of me that year. Kinda amusing to think it was the start of this obsession.

[Tarlar]

My first was Diamond (that and the rest of gen4 is the only ones I have finished and restarted completelt) and I think I started to play in my late teens, somewhere around 17 or 18 I guess?
I started all my pokemon-fan-thingy by watching the anime, which got me to draw my own version of pokemon and at last I bought a DS and a game to try it out.
I was hooked with the first one, but sadly the others have not been able to keep my attention until the end. I prefer rp where the pokemon have more personality ^^
I'm not going to leave pokemon and I will probably continue buy the new games, but I fear I won't ever finish them

[Steven]

My first pokemon game was Pokémon pearl which I started when I was 9.

[Thirdie]

I got my first couple of games as simulators on the pc, which makes it a bit difficult to say, which I got/played first :s I think I finished Yellow first of them, if we are counting beating the league 4 once as finishing. I also started out my time with Pokemon by watching the anime on television.
The first I bought physically, however, along with a used game boy advanced, was Emerald. I must have been around 16-17.

[Silverfire]

Pearl was my first game. I also got an action reply to use my first play through. Never cheated on another one though. I know it's my first game, but Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum are my least favorite games. ORAS is probably my favorite. 6th gen just blew me out of the water!! I've probably dumped 10,000 hours into Pokemon. I've played nearly all the spin offs, the ranger games, mystery dungeon games, battle revolution, Pikachu park, rumble world, all of them. Couple that with playing every single game in the main series to completion at least 4 times each, and you get one poke obsessed girl!!

[Rane]

Crystal was my first game. So that was actually the first time I explored Kanto region too because of the addition. I remember playing without any idea of how the types really worked, so I always wondered why my Chikorita always got slaughtered by Faulkner

[BEAR]

LeafGreen in the fifth grade.. almost a decade ago. Haha I was the same as Rane. I sorta stumbled through the game, not really knowing how anything worked. Kinda learned the ropes as I went. Definitely my favorite game (=

[Blackbird]

I used to watch Barnie, Tella-Tubbies, and Pokemon when I was tiny. My grandma noticed that, and bought Pokemon Colosseum when it came out. She gave it to me when I was four, and we'd sit together on the GameCube and play it. She'd do the reading, I'd gather stuff from pictures and the book (because I couldn't read yet), and would figure it out from that.

She was actually the one who started me on video-games. I beat Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker when I was two (and just after I turned three). I'd sit there and play, she'd read the on-screen text, and I'd look at the pictures in the Guide Book and figure it out from there. I can still remember the boss battle!

So blame my grandmother (who is 68 now and we still play video games together) for starting me on this path.

[Shadowwing]

Pokemon gold and silver

[Deleted]

Pokemon Blue many years ago. I got it shortly after it came out for Christmas along with a Gameboy. Between that and my N64 my grandparents hardly even saw me without an electronic device in my hand. I am still that way now all these years later. Whenever my grandmother needs help with one of her tablets I am usually the one who has to help her. I really miss Blue and once I have the money I plan on buying it at my local retro games store.

[Professor Oak]

My first Pokemon game was actually a spinoff; Pokemon Snap on the Nintendo 64. I'd watched my friends in the playground with Pokemon Red an Blue and also watched the anime so I had been a Pokemon fan for quite some time but I guess my interest in Pokemon really peaked around the time that Pokemon Snap came out and it was the first time that there were 3D models of Pokemon so I was very excited.

Pokemon Snap is quite an interesting and unique Pokemon game as you are taking photos of Pokemon rather than capturing or battling them. Although, the actual game could be clocked in only a few ours and the courses weren't that numerous or long, there's actually quite a bit of depth behind the game. Firstly, the number of probabilities is immense just to be able to take any picture, not just of Pokemon but of the general scenery. Sometimes you can get very bizarre photos and hilarious ones that you don't even recall taking and I think that's amazingly rare in a game where you have that kind of freedom.

Being a bit of a perfectionist, I spent so much time trying to get the perfect photo. I don't think a lot of people today appreciate what a difficult and complex game it was behind the simplicity of the idea. I remember trying for hours to get the perfect picture of Mew on the Rainbow course. It was almost the holy grail of Pokemon photography to get a 10,000 point Mew and I never actually achieved it. The closest I got was 9,800 which was no easy feat to get either. It required very precise timing and skilful use of Pester balls to set up Mew and the use of an "accelerator" button to get very close to it but not too close. All the photos I've seen of the 10,000 point Mew seemed like they were taken in front of the Dugtrio constellation which is a very specific point in the course so for all the stars to align and everything to go right is immensely fortuitous and difficult.

Also, if you see any videos on youtube about getting record shots of certain Pokemon, you will see there is quite a lot of depth that goes into it. Being able to line up certain Pokemon in the shot, slowing down or speeding up the cart and the use of apples/Pester balls is a very skilful art to master. There is also immense timing difficulties. There are Pokemon that leap out of the water and you have to time it perfectly to get a shot of the Pokemon in the split second that it is descending from the air before splashing into the water. To this day, I'm not sure if there are limits to any some of the Pokemon. For Pokemon like Mew, the highest score you can get is 10,000 but for other Pokemon there are so many elements that muddy the water such as bonus points for extra Pokemon in the shot that sometimes you think the sky is the limit. Often I'd take a photo of a Pokemon and think that's as good as it gets but find on the internet a person with 1000 points more for that Pokemon.

If you've ever played Pokemon Snap, I'm sure you'll come to appreciate how complex and engrossing the game can get.


As for an actual Pokemon cartridge game, my first was Pokemon Gold. I got it a few months after Pokemon Snap and it was my first real exposure to the world of Pokemon. It was the most advanced Pokemon game at the time and just seemed so complete a game. The fact that you could explore Kanto after completing the main body of the game was just mind-blowing. Back then there was no internet so it really felt like you were exploring everything on your own. You couldn't go online and look at any guide and had to rely on rumours and hearsay from friends. Things such as the Legendary dogs just appearing on random routes would be quite frightening and I literally did not know what to do. Normally you'd prepare well in advance and save in front of legendary Pokemon before attempting to capture them so the idea of roaming legendaries really threw me off and I'm sure countless others.

Then there was also the duplicating cheat. When I first learned of the cheat from a friend of a friend I was one of the first to know in my school. I told my friend and for a while it was as though we had this amazing secret that no one else knew. We were able to get ahead of the game cloning legendaries and getting Rare Candies and TMs.

Much later on, it was less the cheats but more the glitches that really intrigued me. To this day there are 2 glitches that I have no explanation for despite what I've tried to research on the internet. Whilst playing around with a copy of my friend's Silver version, I managed to clone a corrupted version of Magnemite. This was seriously the weirdest thing I've experienced in a Pokemon game as it resulted in a level 0 Magnemite with no name. Being the curious guy I was, I trained it up with Exp. Share and took it to the Elite 4 and tried battling with it once it evolved into a Magneton. In the final battle with Lance, Magneton became an invincible Pokemon. I literally remember seeing several HP bars across the screen and while Lance's Dragonite's Hyper Beams would deplete several of those HP bars there was literally no end to Magneton's health. After the Elite 4 was defeated Magneton became a "normal" Pokemon (with a name of ) but I was left scratching my head to this day not knowing if what I saw in the battle against Lance had been real. I also remember being so scared that I released the Magneton thinking that I screwed up my friend's game.

The second weirdest glitch I experienced was also playing around with the cloning trick on Pokemon Stadium 2. I managed to somehow fuse 3 Pokemon together. By this I mean that a Kingdra and another grass Pokemon disappeared from my game while a Mantine had inherited their moves. Hence, I had this Mantine that knew moves such as Synthesis and Acid that it could not naturally learn. They showed up in purple in Pokemon Stadium 2. I later learned that sometimes as the batteries go flat in the cartridge, the game gets corrupted. In fact, I think those old cartridges only have a life of 20 years or so. I wonder if my old Gold version is alive today. Perhaps it's just full of glitch Pokemon now.

Anyway, I later got Pokemon Red and experimented with that for quite some time as well. There were so many mysteries with the game that were unknown still at the time such as the your character's name affecting which glitch Pokemon you encounter whilst surfing along the Cinnabar Island coast. For example, one of the letters resulted in an over-leveled (100+) Mewtwo appearing so that was quite handy. There was also another way to encounter Mew or any other Pokemon early in the game. A lot of that was little known at the time. The Missingno idea was well known but some of the nuances weren't found out until later. I guess there is nothing like glitchy old games that continue to surprise you.

[Lamont]

My first pokémon game was Blue version. I played that thing to death on my gameboy pocket XD