About a month ago, I bought a second Pokémon Red cartridge off eBay so I could start a new game and screw around without messing up my save file. As soon as I compared it to my old one, I knew it was either a bootleg or produced somewhere else. You can see in the picture how the sticker doesn't fit the front of the cartridge, and the red plastic is cheap and almost see-through (if you look close, you can see the internal battery on the second, while the first can't be seen through at all). When I started it up, it only had one option - New Game, and unlike the well-loved cartridge I'd been using, it didn't have any wear marks from being inserted into the GBC or anything indicating it'd been used.

Well, what the hell, I figured. I'd poured plenty of money into the franchise and one bootlegged game wasn't going to kill me. I popped it into my GBC and started playing.

A couple of weeks ago, I lost my GBC for a while, so I had to play it on my SP. No huge deal, I thought.

When I started the game up, oddly enough, the backlit screen of my SP went out, like I was playing on an old Game Boy Advance or a Color. I thought that was pretty weird, considering the lower setting of my SP's screen was brighter than the "high" setting on all my friends' SPs, as I took good care of it, and it was unlikely that the backlight would be going anytime soon. But as soon as I switched to playing Sapphire, the screen lit back up. I'd played my other Red on this SP plenty, and it'd never dimmed for an old Game Boy game, so I just attributed it to the game itself being poorly made (which makes no fucking sense, I know).