>>37622306I only really got back into the series recently, but the story of how is a bit interesting, so I'll share.
It starts how all good stories start: on the glorified IRC chat program, Discord. Ah, yes, Discord, the land of porn servers, trannies, and le ebin haggers. I'm one of those groups, feel free to call me a degenerate either way. So I was in a server for discussion of Half-Life beta stuff, mostly fanmade joke mods based on HL2's beta with a little HL1 0.52 on the side. This server has a channel for games that are beta but aren't Half-Life. It was I think June 2 when I actually clicked on it, first I read about Hacx's sequel that never came out, then didn't expect anything else.
Pokémon Gold and Silver, *with ROM files*. This was unreal to me. Gold and Silver leaked, so I downloaded VBALink (it was literally the only GB emulator I knew of at the time) played it, and realized I still enjoyed the gameplay, even if it was a little grindy. So I went and got a copy of Red, played it a little, got my own Missingno and Mew, and decided it was worth it to buy a physical copy.
A physical copy from China, but ah well.
While this was going on, I was watching some YouTubers I hadn't watched for years like Josh Wittenkeller and some I had kept watching like Yuriofwind discuss the beta, and that lead me to find out there's actually a fairly big fandom around the game (I knew it was big, but figured that popularity ended by the mid 2000s, Red was my only evidence the games existed). Sure, Advanced Generation was airing when I was a kid so it's not like it had any basis in reality that Pokémon was dead, but there were a lot of shitty cartoons I never thought anyone ever actually enjoyed on the air in the mid 2000s.
So in short, I got into Pokémon again because I was in a Half-Life server at the right time.
