Can we get a pokemania thread going?!
I don’t know if anyone here is old enough to remember pokemania, but I’ve been fascinated with it ever since I heard about it a couple of weeks ago. People LOVED Pokémon back then, particularly early gems like gen 2, and I wish I was alive to experience it.
Please share your experiences!! I love hearing about this sort of stuff and trying to imagine I was there
It really seems like it was the ‘good old days’ of Pokemon
That's Poliwhirl, but originally his name was Hypno
Omg really! But hypno is a different Pokémon…did they get swapped like ekans and dunsparce?
>That priest that stole a child's pikachu doll and tore it apart with a sword because pokemon is the devil
Nobody knew shit.
No. Seriously. Nobody knew jack shit. Everybody was learning things as they went. Some of the players guides that DID exist lied, and all of them had at least SOMETHING wrong. Maybe a level up move wrong, maybe an item location off. Who knows? DVs (IVs for the boomerkind) were unknown and only the very dedicated would even know that they existed before Gen2. StatExp grew faster, but was harder to learn about than IVs since your level 100 team that you were using to power level that other 'mon would occasionally gain HP after you put it into and took it out of the PC. No reason was given and let's be honest, Gen1 was a miracle that it ran at all with its coding looking back at it now. The only other clue was that the drugs stopped working, and even then, most would probably assume that the wall had been hit.
Nobody knew about the badge boost glitches. Easy to miss when "holding A" boosts your damage and "pressing up + b" boosts your catch rate according to the baby internet.
In fact, of that whole Gen1 list, only a handful knew about toxic/leechseed since only a third (less than a quarter, let's be real) even HAD a Venusaur, most people deleted Leech Seed ASAP most likely, and even if they didn't, Toxic was a TM, and TMs are one use only, which you learned by giving something Bide or Dig and then asking where the TM went.
1/256 miss chance was hilarious though. Almost more often than not, the miss would be for BOTH mons rather than just one or the other.
Hyper Beam recharge you learned the hard way from Lance.
I remember there were lots of rumors about secret rare Pokemon like Pikablu and the Pokegods. If it weren't for the cartoon I probably wouldn't have believed Mew even existed.
It was like the Pokemon GO trend, only it lasted much longer. You couldn't go anywhere or watch anything without seeing Pokemon pop up in some form. The advertising was actually insane.
I remember toys being everywere, and now you barrely can get anything
I don’t think you understand the thread
That’s beautiful! Imagine being at school and no one owns a phone and the internet didn’t exist so you all spend your lunchtimes making up silly stories about Pokémon and talking about how you got a shiny in Crystal
The rumors about the things you could do in this game were so wild. There were a million lies about things like mew-three, battling professor oak, seeing misty's tits, finding gen 2 pokemon in gen 1, and finding Mew, who was like a pokemon cryptid before the movie came along and blew the lid off, and even then we still had unknown shit like Ho-oh.
The thing is, Red and Blue was so full of bugs and glitches ( which people like to say are a detriment despite most of them being beneficial ) that the missingno thing was real, the invisible PC was real, the man on the roof was real, we were all dumb fucks that didn't know shit about bugs so we just thought that Pokemon was full of insane secrets. And there actually were some non-bug related secrets thanks to the item finder, and the legendary pokemon being completely optional encounters instead of scripted story events. None of the school yard rumors seemed too wild to be dismissed. Not even the Misty's Tits one since there was a Pokemon Card with a nude ( albeit heavily shadowed ) Misty that every coomer in school made sure other pokemon fans were aware of.
I’ve heard there are lots of plushies and stuff in Japan; I might be wrong though
How is that not related? That shit is only the kind of thing that happens during pokemania, when it's a new thing that people were ignorant enough to fear. Thinking Pokemon is Satanic was super common during pokemania and you just don't see that nearly as often anymore because pokemon isn't making headlines the way it used to.
fucking tripfags
The fuck you talking about, there's now a plush for every pokemon, and jakks pacific is always pumping out new toys.
If there's one thing that hasn't changed from Pokemania it's the mountains of plastic toys that get manufactured.
Where I come from, the games were much less popular than the trading cards. Not everybody had a Gameboy, but fucking everyone was into the cards. I had a copy of pic related, and I loved thumbing through all the art.
Freaks are still around who do weird shit to Pokémon..in this very forum there are thousands of paedophilia threads
I was talking about the fun fan experiences, not mentally ill religious freaks
Oh sorry I didn't know you wanted sanitized pokemania. I thought it was pretty funny that some bible thumper was so scared of a little yellow mouse that he had to use excalibur to smite it.
It’s ok :)
Mall tours were a thing and like most other events, were not isolated to 1 place in the country (from a US perspective)
They were both for the game and TCG, to promote a mythical pokemon giveaway or other things. Most of them took place inside the mall itself (though one I've been to was in the parking lot), with sectioned-off areas for tournaments and game demos.
The malls were packed, more than usual.
Book stores, card/comic shops, and Toys R Us also had weekly events to play. Some had promo cards you could get.
I was home schooled and this was the only socialization for me
>gen 2 fan that wasn't alive for gen 2
fuck i think you're the only one. that's rare af.
Did it actually last longer though or did it feel like it because we were kids back then and our perception of time worked differently? Then again, I remember the go craze lasting longer than the average modern trend but not that long, over a month maybe? While I could swear pokemania lasted at least around a year.