I Want Pokémon

I’d spent an hour trying to figure out what I’d actually pay for Pokémon on an iPhone. Ten bucks? Twenty? A hundred? The idea was perfect—everyone with whatever device they had, fighting and trading without wrestling some shitty link cable into submission. Like the old days. Just on the phone.

Some guy named Daniel Burford apparently thought so too. He uploaded the yellow version to the App Store for 99 cents. The reviews were exactly what you’d expect—five stars, I love it, just like the original but way better on iPhone. I downloaded it. Crashed three seconds after the title screen. His company was called Home of Anime or something. That kind of half-assed operation.

And people hated it. Someone named Faustino Angel wrote something like I want my money back and I’m suing, which—fair. Nintendo issued some corporate statement about protecting their standards and stopping unauthorized releases. Fine. Didn’t help me get Pokémon on my phone.

But Square had Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger on the App Store. Rockstar had Grand Theft Auto. Sega had Monkey Ball and Sonic. Nintendo had the most famous handheld game ever made and couldn’t figure out how to just sell it to me.

If they were going to do it, I knew what I wanted. Either full retro—16-bit pixels, pure nostalgia—or the opposite, something crazy colorful and 3D. Anime girls with actual breasts. Fluffy clouds. A real character creator. And when another person running it was nearby, my phone should tell me, let us battle over Bluetooth or WiFi. Every generation that mattered. Team Rocket, the Elite Four, all the stupid creature names, even Missingno and the glitches that broke the whole game in half.

What I really wanted was to be a spotty teenager again, blowing hours on something completely pointless, crushing friends who didn’t stand a chance. Nintendo had all of it. Still does. For some reason they wouldn’t give it to me.