Everyone at my school was talking about it, and I wasn't interested at first because I thought Japanese cartoons were dumb.
Then my best friend had the game and made me watch an episode of the anime, it got me hooked.
I got my copy of Pokemon Blue and a second-hand Game Boy and we went on vacation shortly after. I spent the whole week by the pool playing that game.
Yellow came out shortly after and I bought it with my birthday money.
There was also news of Gold and Silver from Japan and I scoured the internet from information, I came across
serebii.net in it's early days due to that.
Here in the UK we had to wait for Gold/Silver to come out in April 2001 whereas the US got it October 2000, which was bullshit. However my parents imported it from the US and I got it as a surprise present for Christmas. I still consider that day to be one of the best in my life.
Pokemania started to die out around that time and for most of my teenage years playing Pokemon was the most uncool thing you could do, but I never stopped playing.
I don't like the way the games are going nowadays and it pains me to say that I might be finally growing out of Pokemon.