“Aren’t you a little too old for that?” 17 years of playing Pokémon

Enlarge / You've probably caught at least one of these, right? (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

This Saturday, February 27, marks the 20th anniversary of the original release of Pokémon Red and Green in Japan. On Friday, Nintendo announced that Pokémon Sun and Moon would be the next games in the main series, and they will be released this holiday season. To commemorate the anniversary and the announcement of the new games, we're re-running the piece below, which was originally published in October 2013.

I’ve been playing Pokémon games since I was 13, and I’ve felt just a little too old for the games pretty much the entire time. Having an eight-year-old brother slavishly devoted to the games, and the anime, and the trading cards, told Young Andrew all he needed to know about the age of kids who were into Pokémon. Even once he (er, me) finally gave in to his curiosity and began playing Pokémon Blue (via the No$gmb emulator on the computer), he only played it with headphones in and the door to his bedroom closed. That experience set the tone for the next decade-plus of Pokémon playing: done in secret, kept to myself, a source of shame.

I’ve never watched the anime. I don’t collect the cards. I don’t play the weird offshoot games like Pokémon Snap, Pokémon Rumble, or Hey You, Pikachu! or whatever. My possession of Pokémon merchandise is limited to a handful of figurines I picked up when I went to Japan in 2010. But every time a new game in the main RPG series has come out, I’ve been there. The games have been with me through childhood into adolescence and adulthood, and while they’ve changed (and I’ve changed) the things I enjoy about them haven’t.

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