How Pokemon tued me into a nerd - CNET

The games themselves all build on the same basic RPG formula. Catch 'em all, be the very best. You get yourself a team of up to 6 Pokemon (from the 151 different kinds available) and trawl through the wildeess to get catch dozens more inside Pokeballs. These creatures level up through elaborate scissors-paper-rock-style battles, leaing new moves and evolving into new forms.

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There were (initially) 15 different elemental types, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The manual came with a helpful chart, showing the matchups. Nobody I knew needed the chart after about a week. It was ingrained, indelibly, in our memories.

You'd also need to trade your in-game creatures with friends, since catching all 151 Pokemon was impossible without both versions of the game. I speak from experience when I say the original cable used to link two Gameboys was, kindly put, temperamental. But I was young. I didn't know the more colorful words I'd use now.

In the five generations released since then, always in matched pairs, the roster of Pokemon has expanded to over 700. The games have only become more complex, introducing things like more elemental types, moves, day/night cycles and breeding. But the core never changes.

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I still remember the precise steps in Red and Blue's complicated item duplication glitch that we, despite being pre-Inteet citizens, still all heard about. We just knew.

It's not hard to quantify the sheer scale of Pokemon. 260 million games in the franchise sold; 21.5 billion trading cards printed (that's a lot of shiny Charizards). The first-generation games sold more copies than the ubiquitous Tetris on Gameboy. Spin-off videogames like Pokemon Stadium and Pokemon Snap. A long-running anime, backed up with 18 movies (when did that happen?).