Bit of a weird question and I'm sure people will go OMG YOU DIDN'T KNOW but...what exactly WAS going on during Gen III? Did people actually play Gen III that much. The best selling GBA games were the Gen III pokemon games. Now, here's some context.

I'm probably a lot more of a casual pokemon player, at least I am now. I'm from the first generation of fans, the little kiddies who started with Gen I when the cartoon aired and pokemania got really wild. I loved Gen 1, everyone at my elementary loved Gen 1. Then Gen 2 came it was even better.

...then the hype all died down. I guess people got sick of pokemons. Or maybe our generation entered it's 'edgy dark teenage' phase. After roughly the release of crystal and the release of the third movie, pokemon died down. At least it did around where I did. Eventually I bought Ruby on a whim, seriously wondering wtf I wad doing buying what, in my mind, a 'kiddy game' as I was in my edgy rebel teen phase. And turned out I loved it, it was great. Thing is; I never saw ANYBODY talk about it or play it, despite many having GBA so for years I assume pokemon wasn't selling so well and yet here we are, at Gen 6 and it's going strong.

So what, was everyone playing Gen III in secret, afraid we'd be laughed at for still liking pokemon when in fact most people were secretly playing them still?