This happen back when i was a school kid, around the release of RSE i guess.

At that time where I’m living (and still until today) Nintendo’s product are quite expensive thus nobody really own a gameboy. Kids only knew Pokemon from the anime and doesn’t even know the game exists.

Then, i guess around that time shops start selling pack consisting stickers of mostly gen2 and 3 mons to kids. They also sell you a sticker book and if you complete it, you can trade them for a gift. I’m not sure if this is an official nintendo product.

Anyway, this became a big thing back then. Every kid starts collecting those stickers. Some rich kid bought a huge box of those sticker packs and sell those to his friends. There were also evil ones who opened the pack to switch the sticker before selling them.

Every kid knew which sticker are the hardest to find. some of them are Feraligtr, Ledian, Metagross and Gardevoir. The most rarest one where every kid dying to find is a fucking MASQUERAIN and it so hard to find that i have 2-3 books with only it being missing. Kid become famous that day if he opened the pack and got this thing.

At that time, i was thinking what the hell is this pokemon, it must be a super strong and majestic legendary mon or something. Not until years later i learned how to emulate RSE and starting playing the game. And i promise myself I’ll catch surskit and evolve into this thing. It was long years of hype, and I was really really really dissapointed.