Everything Starts with a Yellow Rat

Whether I was shouting the PokéRap at full volume down a school corridor, grinding link-cable battles against the kid across the street until one of us nearly cried, or quietly touching myself during Misty’s appearances—Pokémon was where the millennium ended and everything else began. The tiny colored creatures taught me that skipping school was entirely justifiable when Nintendo dropped a new version, that any living thing (cat, dog, technically a dead budgie) could be stuffed into a plastic ball and weaponized for self-defense, and that spending every last bit of pocket money on cardboard printed with Japanese manga figures wasn’t just acceptable but necessary.

You know the game. You play a small boy discarded by his mother and thrown into tall grass by a dubious professor, and from there you walk and swim and fly across every corner of the map, stuffing irritable creatures into your pockets, fighting your way through CPU opponents, real friends, and eventually something that feels uncomfortably like yourself. The joke is that without genuinely threatening classmates with ballpoint pens, exploiting save-state cheats, or paying some kid at school twenty marks for their precious Mew, catching all 151 was effectively impossible—and before you’d gotten close, the number had quietly crept past 250, reproducing faster than the franchise’s dignity could keep pace with. That’s when I got off the ride.

It doesn’t matter much what you became afterward. The point is where it started. Pikachu and the rest were there first, before the identity, before the taste, before anything else calcified into personality. I’d give a lot to go back to being ten with the only real crisis being whether to stay up past midnight grinding Mewtwo’s stats, whether Missingno. would still glitch on the N64 version, whether I could level Articuno to 100 overnight and have the whole thing ready to show off by morning. Those were problems with solutions. You could actually finish them.