Feature: Evolving With Pokémon: How The Games Helped Me Navigate A Confused Childhood

The Game Boy turned 35 years old on 21st April 2024. Today, Tim thinks back on how Pocket Monsters came to his aid in his formative years, and how the series that started on Nintendo's iconic portable would stay beside him in the years that followed.

Pokémon is a clockwork franchise. Its cyclical timetable of releases is akin to milestones on a timeline upon which each new generation of kids can plot their own evolution. Of course, no shortage of ink has been spilt on the topic. I’m certain that you, dear reader, could swiftly identify each Pokémon generation’s release with important snapshots of your past, charting your personal growth within the gaps. At least I can say this much is true for me.

I could reminisce about thinking I was 'too cool' for the Pokémon when Black & White hit (though I’d later go back and love them like they deserved). Or how Sword & Shield’s launch weekend served as a distraction for the harsh breakup I went through a week prior, and a respite from the simultaneous stress of covering an anime convention under this duress. Similarly, I could gush over watching my current partner play Scarlet, reminding me that impactful entertainment can exist separate from the technical woes even I decried upon its 2022 release. (She herself was adamant about finding an adamant-natured Shinx for her own nostalgic purposes.)

Yet nothing trumps how the first two generations of Pokémon guided me through a childhood defined by parental divorce and subsequently moving from a cul-de-sac full of friends to another hundreds of miles away that was at times actively hostile.

Stable beginnings in Pallet Town

Let’s first back up to a time before Pokémon even existed. In fact, neither did I, given that my birth was still a few months off.

This is early 1993, a period during which my dad was seriously hospitalized. To keep his mind off his predicament, he was gifted a Game Boy and two games: Tetris and Super Mario Land. That turned out to be the extent of his game-playing experience, as he passed the handheld down to me a few years later after realizing gaming wasn’t the pastime for him. I was too young to understand what to even do with the thing then and so it collected dust until I was hit with a world-shattering event that my three-year-old brain couldn’t comprehend: my parents were getting divorced.

As most divorces go, my dad moved out of our North Carolina house and the time I had with him was limited to every other weekend in his nearby condominium. I was still too young to understand why things had to be this way, why my dad couldn’t be around all the time. However, there was a capacity in which his presence remained despite his physical absence in the place I called home: the Game Boy he left behind.

I began regularly pouncing through Sarasaland and lining up rows of falling blocks on that trademark olive screen. At some point following its 1998 U.S. release, I came into possession of a copy of Pokémon Red, though I don’t believe I regarded it much at this time; it had nothing to do with my father and thus was beyond the scope of what my young brain contextualized gaming to be. However, the Pocket Monster seed was sown by the cartridge’s presence and set the scene for me to level up in October 1999.

If that date rings a bell, it’s because that’s when Pokémon Yellow was released in the States. My mom gifted me the game alongside a Pikachu Edition Game Boy Color so that I could play along with other kids in the cul-de-sac where the Pokémon craze had rooted itself deeply through not only the games but also anime and TCG. It immediately defined my friendships with my neighbors as we battled, traded, and bantered about our favorite Pokébuddies every day.

This was also when the scariest gaming experience of my life occurred when an older boy living next door summoned MissingNo. into my copy of Yellow, leading to countless nightmares of glitchy pixels. That L-shaped Tetris block never looked quite the same again! Though by that same measure, I was barely seeing that Tetrimino at all as my dad’s Game Boy quickly became lost to time. Much like Ash’s missing father figure—something I took keen note of—so too had the item I most associated with my dad disappeared in the wake of its replacement.

Looking back on it now, the shift to an upgraded handheld was probably a bigger factor in coming to terms with my parents’ divorce than I realized. Through ownership of this new device, I was no longer clinging to my dad’s absence. He still had a consistent presence in my life outside the home, but reminders of him in the home were dissipating quickly. There were new avenues through which Pokémon became a vehicle for growing my relationship with my dad, such as him taking me to my first theatrical viewing of Pokémon: The First Movie. Yet the reality of Pokémon bursting into my world through the Game Boy Color meant that my dad was pushed a little more out of it by way of mere object association. Again, as played out as it is to invoke Ash’s dad’s absence, it was too fitting a parallel, though the parallels between my life trajectory and Pokémon was about to reach whole new levels.

To Johto and back again

The turn of the century shook up the status quo I had come to accept. Near the end of 2000, my mom, sister, and I moved to Connecticut. This coincided with my dad moving to Massachusetts and later Rhode Island, meaning he no longer lived in a condo a short drive away. Meanwhile, I was whisked away to a new cul-de-sac devoid of any kids or any of the neighborly friendliness I was accustomed to. It was serendipitous that on the day we flew out, my mom handed me a copy of Pokémon Silver. A new journey in a new Pokémon region as a misty-eyed me left behind my Pokémon-loving friends behind for a new Earth region.

I didn’t fit in with the kids at my new school and the man living next door threatened to get his gun after stepping onto his lawn once

The Johto generation was magical for kids of the time because it was the first time ever stepping beyond Kanto, and for me this wonderment was accentuated by now living in a place devoid of it. I didn’t fit in with the kids at my new school and the man living next door threatened to get his gun after stepping onto his lawn once, a far cry from the neighborhood kid culture of making forts in the woods behind our homes that I had formerly known. This made the more overtly Japanese theming of Johto all the more enticing to my younger self that wasn’t yet acclimated to the world’s vast cultures, let alone did I even conceptualize the game was made in another country. Johto therefore became my picturesque ideal of a 'new place,' or at least one better than where I ended up. It wasn’t home—that was Kanto—but it was comfortable.

Anyone familiar with Pokémon’s second generation can likely guess what happened next. After finally beating Johto’s Elite Four—something that was no small feat for a seven-year-old—the S.S. Anne unexpectedly whisked me back to Kanto. I could return to the home I wished I still lived in.

However, what should have been euphoric was quickly met with unease. This new Kanto felt empty. Wrong. The alterations made to that first-generation map I could still walk through in my head created a creeping sense that my old home had moved on without me. This sense of becoming an outsider to familiar places is one I’d similarly feel upon return trips to North Carolina. The places both in and out of the game that helped me cope with difficult life events like my parents’ divorce were no longer mine. Heck, even the battle against my former player character at the end of that Kanto return trip in its own way forced me to overcome my past. It was all a signal to move on.

Into the Ruby sunset

As time passed, the Game Boy Advance became my handheld of choice alongside the third generation of Pokémon it heralded. By this point, I was well established in my new neighborhood, though still struggling to fit in. The closest I got was a group of boys who I’d jump on the same fad trains as. Yu-Gi-Oh!, Beyblade, Bionicle… the cool thing in the schoolyard was ever-changing, and I was always eager to partake in order to socialize.

My continued playing of Pokémon was often in solitude in the wake of these fads but this new way of appreciating the franchise was perfect for me. Ruby & Sapphire came with no baggage attached. They were Pokémon games I could enjoy entirely on my own terms. From this point forward, I could start to view my relationship with every Pokémon generation not in how they reflected my real life, but how my real life impacted how I interfaced with them.

When I felt 'too cool' for Black & White, I was squarely in my angsty teenager phase trying (and failing) to convince myself that shooters were the only cool genre. When I soldiered through Shield directly following a harsh break-up, my complicated early history with the franchise reminded me that life always finds a way to move on, even when it seemed irreparably split in two. And watching my girlfriend now play Scarlet and lovingly discuss her “croc” starter, I’m brought back to those early joys surrounding the shared experience I had with my fellow cul-de-sac dwelling Poké Maniac friends.

But this is simply my journey. I’d love to hear about the life experiences you relate to your Pokémon adventures, or even the special meaning a certain console may have for you, like my dad’s Game Boy did for me.