Like many other kids, I was pulled into Pokémon more through the cartoon than the fact that it was something I could also plug into my Game Boy, and watching the anime is still an occasional guilty pleasure of mine. Team Rocket are clearly the real stars of the show, but let's not get ahead of ourselves...

I was relatively new to RPG games when Pokémon first released, and as a naive kid I had a lot to learn about battle tactics and status changes. One of the first memories I have of starting out on my Pokémon Red journey was my very first battle with a wild Pidgey. It blasted me with Sand Attack and Charmander's accuracy fell. “Oh no,” I remember fretting over the next few turns of the battle, “my Charmander is terrible at battling now! I think I've wrecked my game!”

Fortunately, the nasty Pidgey hadn't succeeded in forever tainting my Charmander as I originally feared, but I'm curious to know how many other players immediately thought they would have to somehow train their Pokémon to “get back” their lowered battle stats.

Long after finishing the game I actually did wreck my file by performing the Cinnibar Island Surf trick to obtain Missingno. and I distinctly remember seeing my Hall of Fame glitch up with a sprite of Mew many months before the Pokémon was made available to the public. I promptly spazzed out and made my school friends jealous by showing off my irretrievably glitched save file. Kids are weird.

Looking back, Gen 1 has aged pretty terribly with no run button, clunky item management, and ugly game sprites, but I can't wait to play it all over again when the Virtual Console titles hit the eShop. I hope these sell well enough to warrant Gold/Silver/Crystal getting a re-release since Johto is my favorite region in the series and the sequels improved on the original titles in many ways.