>>5815464531 here and I grew up with gen 1, everyone's experience is gonna be different depending on their circumstances beyond just age. I was 4 in 1998 when pokemon came to the usa. Other 4 year olds may have been a bit ahead of me in reading and played the games themselves. Or not been interested in pokemon at all yet. A Japanese kid would be waiting on gen 2 with yellow to hold them over at the time and a European kid would MAYBE have heard of it if they kept up with game news but wouldn't play for another year.
I mostly got into the anime, tcg, and toys but I was aware of and wanted to play the games. We only had a pc at the time so I just searched pokemon stuff on dogpile between playing shareware fps games, I knew a few words and I had a poster with all 150 with their names and numbers that I used to look them up, and my mom would sit with me and read stuff to help me navigate the web. I knew some general stuff the older neighbor kids (who did play) didn't because I stumbled across sites that talked about stuff in Japan that wasn't in the west yet or never would be, I vividly remember getting into an argument with Mike next door about if green version existed and bringing him up to the computer to show him some shitty fan site with plain text and tiny photos of the box, manual, cart, and some very bad shots of it running on their gameboy. Spent more and more time "studying" pokemon as time went on and even got a guide book as a 5th birthday present, basically learned to read through pokemon. Most I played before crystal was snap and stadium at someone else's house or one of my friends occasionally handing me their gameboy and saying "I want to evolve this, you know how to do that, right?" and letting me grind a bunch of levels on a fresh catch for them while we hung out. I was more than happy to do it because I got to play pokemon, it didn't even occur to me the older kids were just using me to skip the boring parts.
