>>23302057Not OP, but I think it's debatable. When I was 8, I used to read gaming magazines religiously as a child. Electronic Gaming Monthly and Nintendo Power were chief among these. They previewed Pokemon before it was released in the US and pointed out that it was a damn fun little game, and I loved the idea of catching all sorts of monsters to make my own fighting team, plus I loved the designs that I'd seen so far. I was hooked right there, and this was almost a year (at the very least several months) before it was released in the US. I was literally showing everybody I knew the preview articles and artwork, getting them all hyped up and talking all my friends into buying the game so we could trade and battle.
I drug my mom to Toys R Us to buy it the day it came out and I played non-stop for the next month or so, training all my pokemon up, tracking down/trading for the hard to find ones and grinding to level up the last few for my pokedex so I'd be the first at my school to complete it. The actual hype didn't really take off until the game had been out for a bit and word got around about how awesome it was, and then the anime became a thing, plus burger king/kfc toys, etc. and it became a phenomenon. If we're talking world-wide then yeah, the US got it after the hype had started, but within my own country? I was a bit ahead of the trend.
