>>18908659Not quite right. Obviously, there were some people who tried to battle to win, but the numbers literally were in the double digits back then. So regardless of how much effort these people put into it, I wouldn't call this few people a "scene". That's why RBY is mostly famous for retroactive play. Not even all viable strategies in the RBY metagame have been discovered "live", most of the analysis was performed when RBY was long dea already.
Gen II was a lot different there and really was the starting point of a competitive Pokémon scene. Of course, compared to nowadays, it the scene was tiny as fuck, you literally knew everyone from battling 1 hour a day and at some times, you could watch EVERY competitive battle fought at a certain point in time. However, the metagame was "exhaustive" and that people discovered and played everything there was to know about GSC, the community was internationally organized by that point and analysis methods were established.
Gen III really didn't change too much here. The thing most people see it as the starting point is because it was the starting point of Smogon. (Yeah, they started playing GSC, but they played it retroactively when RS were already out, because you could not convince larger communities to use the rsbot by then.) Anyways, Smogon was just one site among many during that era and had nowhere near the impact on the competitive scene as it has now. The one thing that changed is that starting with Emerald, people began to look into RNG abuse on the actual cardridges and thus it paved the way for cardridge gaming, which was pretty much non-existant before.
It was Gen IV that built on the spark that was already there in the community and allowed for online battling, bringing a huge increase in people involved with Pokémon battling.
