>>53174343I live in a post-soviet third world shithole and back in late 1990s and early 2000s when pokemania boom happened nobody here even knew what gameboy even is. But every kid, and I mean every fucking kid saw the original show. It was dubbed and translated daily on one of the russian channels. And people went really fucking crazy about it. Maybe a couple of educated kids knew about the Nintendo and the games, but most of us thought that the show was the only thing. Local stores catched up pretty quickly and started selling bootleg booster packs with cards (they also put some generic bubble gum inside them for some reason) and I was nagging my mom to by me some every time she went shopping for months. That batch had gen1 pokemons and I collected almost all 150 of them. There were a couple really rare motherfuckers I couldn't get.
And I didn't even know the rules for the tcg, nobody knew. We just brought duplicates to school and played against each other putting cards on top of each other and hitting it with the hand. The winner took those that flipped.
I learned about the games many years later and it was such a revelation to me. My whole fucking life changed that day.
