March 23, 2011
Incoming wall of text, I hope you read it though.
Kids, what are you going to do? They’re our future apparently, yet I find this disheartening when so many of them are ignorant of the past. No I don’t mean National or World History, I’m talking about video games, obviously. A Kid today lives in a world of nigh photo-realistic 3D rendered polygons. Real time dynamic lighting and shading, handhelds with more computing power than NASA’s entirety when they sent men to the moon. In short what I’m saying is they don’t know how good they have it.
I was born right after the home video game crash of 1983. The first video games I played was on my Grandmother's Atari 2600, and even my three year old brains was smart enough to know that E.T. and Pac-Man (the Atari version) were complete garbage. I may have started on an Atari, but I was raised on the Nintendo Entertainment System, the shining golden Phoenix the revived an all but dead industry. I grew up with gaming legends like Mario, Link, and Samus. My backlog of games is a roadmap of video game history. A history kids today will likely never play.
What does this have to do with the comic however? Well I’ll tell you. Pokémon came out in 1995, I was 11 at the time and was square in the demographic for the whole Pokémon phenomenon. I watched the show, collected the cards, and of course, played the games. As I grew up I stopped watching the show, I stopped collecting the cards, (though I play Magic the Gathering, so I didn’t change that much,) but I continued to play the games. While most people see Pokémon as strictly for children, I disagree. The Anime is for kids, but the games, the games are for everybody. They appeal to children as they’re games with character from their favorite cartoon, but for me, and most people my age still playing Pokémon, we play because it’s a traditional RPG in a classic style with a battle system as deep as they get.
Which brings me to the comic. At PAX I ran into several people in my age group who played Pokémon, and while waiting in line for a panel I had a nice conversation with one of my peers, and the entire time we were talking there was this kid, that had to be no older than 8 wearing a little Pikachu Beanie hat listening to our conversation. I assumed the kid was the guy’s son, since kid’s aren’t allowed in the convention without an adult, but when I mentioned that the first Pokémon game I played was Blue the kid said verbatim what he says in the comic, and than ran off down the hallway. I don’t think I’ll ever find out what the kid was doing there, but I assure him, I’m not old, he’s just simply too young.
