>>54206716You can't make a fad last forever. They were lucky they were still in the days where people's attentions spans weren't completely shot yet and it lasted more than a few months. But no craze even back then lasts more than a couple years.
Also - kids naturally start bullying each other for still being into kiddy stuff after a certain, but still young age. They captured that sweet spot of kids old enough to read and play video games, but that demographic quickly approached the double digit age. In my elementary it was around the time we'd go to the "big kid's side" of the playground. That was the lion's share of their audience, who Pokemon was now spoiling into lameness with. Older kids that still liked it would have to hide it or embrace the social status of being a nerd.
Maybe if they made the franchise grow with those kids and introduced whores and guns before GTA SA became the hot thing?
But for me it wasn't gen 2 that slammed the brakes harder, unless you're talking about the anime. There was a raffle for Silver at my school, trading cards was still going hot, and we were all playing and helping each other find stuff in the game. Kyogre and Groudon were just not cool looking at all, seeing them advertised with the logo sparked no desire to buy when my interests were already moving on. And that's on top of having to have the motivation to bug my parents to buy me a new console, which I never did until years later for the SP, and then mainly played gen 1 and 2 on it.
