Why when or how did you get in to pokemon

I watched television as a kid and saw the anime with Ash.
And then I got Pokémon Red version, the card game, and some of the ridiculous merchandise of the time such as the cereals or the toothbrushes.
I was born in the mid-1990s. Pokémon was huge back then, half the kids in my school had cards.
 
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I got into pokemon quite late compared to a lot of other people that are probably going to post in this thread as i was introduced to the series through Pokemon GO in 2016, I never owned a 3DS so I couldn’t play any mainline games until i got the special edition LGPE Nintendo Switch in 2018 and with it, Let’s Go Pikachu

I’ve played every mainline game since except Let’s Go Eevee, Shining Pearl and Violet
 
The anime prolly came first but I remember a holiday when my American cousins came to visit and they had a Game Boy. I never got one myself but my older brother got ROMs and one of the older emulators so I could play Pokémon Red or Blue plus the Pinball games. I also remember we got collector's albums (those where you have to place the sticker cards; never knew how they were called in English but you'd trade and play for them) that had learnset and stuff with some very funny mistranslations like calling Leech Life "Vida de Sanguijuela"—sort of like A Bug's Life.

I got so into Pokémon as a kid that I'd even play with my friends something I called "Laberinto Pokémon", which didn't really have much of labyrinth but I'd draw the map and towns and every fight and whatever, all with what little information I actually had about it lol. I'd also make a bunch of fakemons like a Steel-type evo to Raticate called Rattatita and, of course, even more evos to Charizard because what kid doesn't like Charizard.

Now that's what I call a trip down memory lane.
 
I used to watch the anime as a kid and soon stopped it once I started going to school. I did not have any major connections with the franchise other than casual discussion about Pokemon with my friends. I did not have any console, so I could not play the games either.
I was looking for playable online Pokemon games sometime in 2019 and that's how I found Pokemon Showdown. This was the point when I actually got into the franchise (and I've been playing on PS! ever since).
 
I first got into Pokémon through the TCG. It was in 1999, Pokémon had just reached Europe. I was 8 years old and in second grade at school. Since I am born in the early 90s, I was right in the target audience for the franchise at the time. But it took a while before I got hooked, because at first, I was not interested in Pokémon at all! All the hype surrounding the Pokémon TCG at my school just made it seem extremely overrated, there was no way it could be that good. I also found it very difficult to understand, and the names of the Pokémon were so strange. I remember thinking that "Charizard" was an unnecessarily complicated name, why couldn't it be something simple like "Zazad" instead?

However, my interest gradually grew stronger (it was hard to not care about Pokémon when everyone else was so into it), and I eventually started to buy and collect the cards myself. I first got into the TCG, then the anime, and finally the games as well. I had seen some other kids in the schoolgrounds bring their Game Boys with the games (R/B/Y and G/S/C) and play during the breaks, and it seemed really fun. I ended up getting a Game Boy Color on my own, and Blue became my first Pokémon game. After that, I never really quit Pokémon. I continued getting the games, with Violet being my latest game at the time of writing this. I have played almost all main series games, the only ones I have skipped completely are LGP/E and BD/SP. My interest in Pokémon hasn't always been super high, I have also been burnt out on the series on a few occasions, but I'm still keeping up with the series... and at this point, I'm not sure if I am even able to quit Pokémon (not that I want to).
 
My friend showed me Pokemon Silver on his gameboy one day. The battles reminded me of baseball. He let me walk around on the route. I thought, wow, this is so amazing. I started watching the anime reruns right after and eventually got my own game - Emerald. Those days were spent trading mons with neighborhood kids, figuring out TCG, picking up the older games at the video game store for cheap, hearing schoolyard rumors of epic postgame rewards... It's been a lifelong obsession ever since. I don't always finish the new games but I always get them when they come out. Competitive and speedrunning are great because they keep the older games I grew up with feeling brand new.
 

bdt2002

Pokémon Ranger: Guardian Signs superfan
is a Pre-Contributor
I enjoy talking about this so I can continue to hate myself and regret a lot of the dumb decisions I made when I was younger. The shift into the 2010s for me was centered around our family moving to a new house and a new school district, where in the third grade I heard about the Pokémon TCG for the first time. At some point in the early 2010s, I got my hands on a number of Pokémon games, namely Pearl, SoulSilver, White, and especially Pokémon Ranger: Guardian Signs. The order in which I “obtained” these four games remains lost to history, as do all of my original save files and play history with those games, but I have played through them all since then multiple times.

Here’s a list of some of the decisions I either regret or didn’t have full control over:
  • Deleting of my original save files that had a lot of my first Pokémon, including my first Shinies for what it’s worth
  • Using an Action Replay for a select few games (I have no idea how this happened, but my original SoulSilver cartridge is in horrible shape despite this being one of the games I did not use that for)
  • Putting off completing several games for extended periods of time because of unrelated circumstances each time
 

bdt2002

Pokémon Ranger: Guardian Signs superfan
is a Pre-Contributor
I apologize for the double post, but I was having some issues trying to click off of the bulleted list when I was attempting to finish the rest of the post. In any case, what I was going to say was that it’s because of this franchise that I know a lot of what I know and also a major part of why I have a lot of the friends I’ve made over the years.

That being said, while I wouldn’t trade those memories for anything, there is an argument to be made that quitting Pokémon can and would be better for my mental health in the long run. I’ve lost a lot of interest in the games and especially the rest of the merchandise as I’ve gotten older, and my increased knowledge of modern corporate business and the gaming industry as a whole doesn’t help matters either. It would be something if I had at least had a desire to experience modern Pokémon to the fullest, but it’s been so inconsistent that I started questioning if this was even a mental health problem at all instead of me just being stupid and stubborn.

(the child in me also still can’t move on from my regrets I listed earlier, so uhhh yeah, sorry to be such a buzzkill but I wanted to use this thread as a chance to open up)
 

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