I recall when I was around twelve I was spending a couple of days at my younger cousins house. When I arrived there, I found him with two of his friends sitting in a circle in his room. They each had gameboy advances. One had a red GBA cartridge, another blue, and another green. "What are you doing there?" I asked. "We're trying to play through the new pokemon games in one sitting!" they said. This excited me greatly. I pulled out my clear case gameboy pocket from my messenger bag, turned it on with the volume up to produce the iconic "ding!", and wiped the save file on my copy of Pokemon: Gold Version. "Mind if I join you?" I asked. They smirked at each other and said "sure, go ahead", doing all but rolling their eyes at my 'archaic' hardware and game. And so we sat, occasionally commenting on our progress and the pokemon that we captured. After about, I believe it was something like six and a half hours, they all started fighting the elite four. I knew then that I wouldn't be completing my game at the same time as they were. And after about precisely seven hours, they were all claiming victory, saying things along the lines of "That was easy!". I was unbothered by this, and continued to enjoy my playthrough of gold version. They started asking how I was doing on the elite four, and were surprised when they learned I hadn't even got there yet. "You must be playing slow!" they said. But no, I corrected them, I had been playing relatively quickly if anything. "It simply must be the case that your games are shorter", I said. They all tried to hide downcast looks at this comment. "Here, you can watch me play!". They huddled around me as I moved on from the lake of rage and eventually beat the elite four, about ten hours after we began our little group adventure. "Wow, I guess there's just a little bit more content in this old game!" one of the boys said. "Oh, that's nothing." I said, as I surfed toward the waterfall to the east of New Bark town. "Watch this!"
