Thread 11920165

How was it to battle and trade Pokémon with other kids at the height of Pokémania?

>>11920165 (OP)
no one wanted to and then they stole all my holographic Pokemon cards on the school bus

>>11920165 (OP)
Like taking a shit with no asshole

>>11920165 (OP)
Fucking lame compared to data mining the games and min maxing against other obsessive autismos after 400 hours of EV training each party member. Zoomers rule!

>>11920165 (OP)
I played every day after school with my bros, it was a memorable time in my childhood.

>>11920165 (OP)
I couldn't tell you. I was nearly 50 when go came out.

>>11920165 (OP)
You'll never know.

>>11920196
Holy shit grandpa

Only with 2 friends, and they didn't really live near me, so we arranged a meet up on a Saturday back in 1999 to do some trading, and also starting over to have all 3 starters, so first we traded all the pokemon we wanted (the exclusives, the link-cable evolution only, etc) and then we started various new files with one cart to get 3 starters for each or something like that. It took us the whole day and we still couldn't do all we wanted. In fact, both my friends completed their dex, but I didn't, I was missing something, can't remember what, and anyway I restarted my file, now with 3 starters and a bunch of pokemon exclusive from the Blue version that one of my friends had (me and the other kid had Red).
Also, the night before, I stayed awake until like 5 AM playing on Safari Zone, because none of us had Tauros. I finally catched one, and it was thanks to that that my friends could complete their dex.
Years later I got Pokemon Stadium with the transfer pak and got as many starters and rare pokemons as I wanted lol.
With gen 2 I had more friends into it, I remember trading pokemons and mystery gifts, and doing battles a lot

Battling was lame because no one was ever near the same level and there was only one save slot so no one wanted to replay it alongside each other. Trading was neat I guess.

I've always been a loser with no friends, but i did have a little brother, so i forced him to get the other version i didn't want and we completed each other's pokédexes.

primarily this meant he couldn't actually get his own game started until he unlocked trading in six different games in a row so we could both start with all three starters.

>>11920179
>and then they stole all my holographic Pokemon cards on the school bus

What kind of fucked up school you went to, dude?

>>11920240
My school banned anything Pokemon because so many people were stealing cards. Kids cried, parents got involved, instaban. It was a nice school too.

>>11920240
I was in elementary school and I stupidly brought my cards to school to show everyone. They ended up being passed around and when they got back to me all my best cards were missing and I had no way of knowing who took them.

>>11920240
It's called Planet Earth. Specifically the human society.

It sucked. Battling barely happened because people would back out the second they noticed they were on average 5 levels below you. And even then once I started consistently winning people stopped battling me. Trading only ever happened for version exclusives and starters. And all this is assuming someone planned ahead and brought that godforsaken cable (nevermind when one person had a GBC and one had a DMG). Shame that it took until gen 4 for this stuff to really get smoothed out.

>>11920181
How so?

I wouldn't know. My school bullied me for liking video games—ESPECIALLY Pokémon.

I never traded or battled with anyone because only one kid had a link cable and he was a prick

Ah—Pokémania at its zenith! To battle and trade Pokémon with other children during that incandescent period—roughly spanning 1998 to 2000 in much of the West—was to participate in a cultural phenomenon so all-consuming that it seemed less like a hobby and more like an unspoken social contract. Schoolyards transformed into bustling, ad hoc trading floors—Game Boys linked by physical cables (the now-quaint Link Cable, itself practically a relic even then) became conduits for transactions both practical and mythic.

The experience was at once competitive and communal. Battles were fierce—teams painstakingly trained, strategies refined with all the tactical seriousness that nine-year-olds could muster—yet trading was its own delicate diplomacy. Negotiations over rare creatures like Mewtwo or the elusive starters had all the gravitas of international treaties—complete with heartbreak, triumph, and, on occasion, whispered accusations of “cheating.”

And over it all hung the strange electricity of the moment—Pokémon cards, television episodes, the first films, and the games themselves forming a kind of omnipresent cultural ecosystem. To battle and trade during this height was not simply to play a game—it was to inhabit an entire shared mythology. It was a social rite, a lingua franca, and for a time, it seemed, an indispensable component of childhood itself.

In short—Pokémon battling and trading during the height of Pokémania was less a pastime than a generational experience, a flashpoint of collective imagination unlikely to be replicated.

>>11920469
intrinsically human post

I never played the Pokémon TCG I only collected it. It was pretty cool at the time when it was new because you could assume a lot of people even strangers just had the cards with them so there was always the sense you could trade anywhere. Yugioh was also like this for a while in the early 2000s. I was able to make a trade at the mall with some other bored kid while my mom was dragging my little brother and I around while she shopped for clothing. Same thing when I was at the dentist, I was able to trade in the dentists office waiting area. Another yugioh trade was me sitting in the car, looking through my cards, seeing someone looking at their cards, and me autistically getting out of the car asking if they would want to trade. I completed my trade before my mom even got back from inside the gas station.


Point of my rambling is that Pokémon and yugioh really were everywhere for a while and that was probably what made it so cool to me. The negative about this though was how obsessed people were. I’ll share a story in the next post.

>>11920509
So anyway. When I was in 3rd or 4th grade that was when Pokémon was really fucking taking off. People would bring their cards to trade at lunch or in class. The school made some gay ass fucking rule that you couldn’t bring them anymore and if the faculty saw you had Pokémon cards they would take them and you would need to get them afterschool from the principles office.


I was in a group of like 10 other people trading cards at recess, and one of those retard useless yard duty soccer moms came up and took all of our cards to the principles office. She didn’t bother to seperate them in any meaningful way.


So when I went to get my cards after school a bunch of them were missing and I assume a lot of the other kids cards were missing too because some fucker decided to steal our shit like a fucking asshole. This is how obsessed people were back then about this shit. It was like gold to them, or crack. That was the downside to the Pokémon craze.


Nonetheless I think it was good for there to be something that popular that everyone could enjoy together or talk about. Today I’m sure people just huddle together talking about Mr beast or some stupid streamer or something if anything at all. whether it’s Pokémon, yugioh, or something, it’s probably good for there to be things like that in society to gets people to tolerate eachother and socialize. maybe the closest thing today is those lame ass marvel movies. I have no idea.

>>11920524
Nice hearing your story, thanks for posting. Pokemon on Switch is still popular, but the most social thing is the Pokemon Frienda arcade game, it is really huge right now and stuff like stamp rallies, events, tie-ins with ice cream stores, etc.
As for me when I was a kid, I lived right beside a poor neighborhood, literally the next street over, and everyone would play Pokemon cards for keeps. That meant if you lost you had to give up whatever card the winner wanted. If you won they would give you the card, but you would have to run like a motherfucker after because they would start crying and call their friends or siblings or whoever and try to jump you for the card back

>>11920246
>overparenting

>>11920524
For us it was these "topps" cards. The TCG hadn't arrived yet in my town, but they had these cards at the gas station and the supermarket and we were frantically obsessed with collecting them. Even now I get a faint sense of that mania just from looking at the pictures. We were definitely way more enamored with these cards than with the Gameboy games or the TCG which rolled around later.

I remember I did get the whole 151 set together in a binder but of course me being a retard, I didn't preserve it, so it was lost.

>>11920165 (OP)
>Be me
>Hear rumor about 151st Pokemon
>Probably bullshit
>Fuck around with the well known Missingno glitch.
>Hall of fame completely fucked up
>MEW APPEARS IN THE HALL OF FAME
>HOLY SHIT IT'S REAL
>Can't get it.
>Erase game to try the S.S. Anne trick
>It's absolute bullshit.
>Fuck it, I'll get a Gameshark.

You could do a study on the spread of diseases based on the amount of people I duplicated Mews to. I was patient zero, and from there, everyone I ran into afterwards had a Mew in their game in my city. But no one did before I introduced it.

I still remember the code. 0115D8CF

>>11920165 (OP)
You'll never know, bot-kun.

I was the biggest Pokémon autist ever.

>maxed out the clock at 255:55 and kept playing long after that
>had a fuck ton of different mons at lvl 100, most of which I grinded myself by beating the elite 4 over and over
>had figured out the concept of EVs and IVs just from NPC clues and looking at stats
>had figured out the logic behind the casino slots and the best strategy to maximize winnings

And yet, I didn't know anyone with a link cable until at least 3years after I stopped caring about the franchise. Which is how I can tell you that a solo playthrough of Blue has a max of 128 mons you can get because the stat screen is graved into my brain (iirc it's 129 with Red).
Once I found someone with a link cable he cloned all the mons I was missing for me, including a Mew which was a bitch passed around the entire town, but then I immediately felt guilty for having tainted my long-built save with cheating. Years later I sort of made up for it by completing the pokédex the intended way except using emulators and BGB to trade with myself

>>11920246
I learned early on not to lend things to others.
Retards would call me selfish and jealous, while bothering the fuck out of me.

Link cable shit was mostly garbage because no one I knew wanted to deal with sending off their hard-trained mons or not being able to change the nicknames (I was a huge nicknamefag and just about everyone I knew hated it).
By the time Gen2 rolled around, my dad got me Silver and picrel and I came to understand the actual fun of Pokemon wasn't in the time-wasting raising/breeding, but in making interesting teams without any of the bullshit and seeing how far you could take them in Stadium.

>>11920246
>My school banned anything Pokemon because so many people were stealing cards.
What the fuck...

Literally no one I ever knew that was into Pokemon ever had the link cable. It wasn't until the DS games where I ever got to experience trading and battles but by that point nobody else was really into it anymore so that was a rarity. Never even got to use the wifi features of the gen 4 and 5 games because my router was too new and wasn't compatible with the shitty outdated even for the time DS wifi spec.

Basically outside of a small handful of times Pokemon has been a singleplayer experience for me despite having friends. If only they bundled the games with that fucking cable...

>>11920256
kill yourself

>>11920165 (OP)
The only other guy I knew that had GB and Pokemon was such an autistic asshat and sore loser that it was just annoying.

>>11920240
Any American public school, at least in a medium-to-large city, is like that. Not Pokemon but still related, we had a teacher who was really into Magic the Gathering who brought some cards to school, and he ended up getting fired for freaking out and yelling at the kids because the cards got stolen

So /vr/ is going to be 50% threads like "how was it to not be underage at the time" now? is this your concept of engagement, new mods?

>>11921227
What new mods? Who are you talking to? There aren't any new janitor. That's precisely the issue.

>>11921227
>not underage
>at the time

>>11921221
>Any American public school, at least in a medium-to-large city, is like that
you could just say inner-city schools

>>11920165 (OP)
It was surreal.

There was one kid in the neighborhood with a strategy guide who knew where to catch everything, and he was treated like some kind of sage. If you didn't know how to get something, you'd ask them in exchange for some kind of payment (usually gum or something, a couple quarters, or even a card if you weren't already friends (our guy liked those Topps cards)).
This was a BIG deal, since once you knew how to get something good, you became THE guy to go to if someone else wanted one. You had a child-like approximation of power.

If you wanted something that wasn't in your game, or if you didn't deal with the guide kid, you'd trade with someone. Usually someone you didn't even know, but either they were THE guy or you heard from a friend that they have one. From there you'd work out a "fair" trade.
He had something you wanted so the ball was in his court, and depending on what it was he might not be so reasonable. You'd offer something, they'd usually ask for more, and you'd sweeten the deal until they either relented or you told them to pound sand.
Evolution trades were mostly limited to friends, since no one wanted to risk the other guy running off with it. But the handful of times that actually happened, word spread and they were effectively blacklisted.
Trading for legends or starters was unheard of. At least in my neighborhood, you'd only exchange them for dex entries, and even then it was just the final stage.

Gold and Silver crashed the economy.
Once rare Pokémon and starters could just be bred infinitely, they lost a lot of value as long as your group had a Gen 1 game. Legends still retained their value up until the cloning glitch became widespread, and that's about when Pokémania died off in our neighborhood.

>>11920234
Battling didn't really shine here until Stadium enforced specific level thresholds. It happened, obviously. But every time, some asshole (fuck you Nick) would sneak his overleveled starter in and cry if he wasn't allowed to use it. And since there were only 5 of us in the group, we had to let him play.
Once someone got Stadium, the GAME would tell him to fuck off.

>>11921239
Slam attack!

>>11921221
>magic the gathering

There was a guy at a place I worked who reselled Magic cards to kids, he'd make them come to the courtyard break area of the workplace to do it. Damn I couldn't stand that guy. One time he heard I was playing NES music for myself to work with and we talked retro games for a bit but I cut the conversation short because I wanted nothing to do with a coomlecting reseller scum.

Thanks for reading my blogpost I thought maybe I'd have made /vr/ proud