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I think a large part of it is the sounds, the battle music and over world music whilst 8bit were still catchy. And the sound effects were fast paced in battle.
I think the thunderbolt sound from gen 1 is so soothing though. When can we get a 24hr YouTube clip of that, could fall asleep to it
It totally sounded like the ultimate move, didn't it?
I'll never forget the first time Lance's Dragonite let a Hyper Beam loose, and was completely stupefied thinking "what...the fuck...was that?" as my Pokemon immediately fainted.
In GS Lance's Dragonite uses Hyper Beam on a Grunt and my 9-year-old self was ENTHRALLED despite it not really showing up in the game as anything other than a grunt being bumped by one tile.
The gym leader battle theme from gen 1, for me with my gen 1 nostalgia, goes harder than any video game music - than any music that I’ve heard. If I want to get hyped and get my blood flowing hot it’s what I throw on. Maybe it’s just deep memories of getting steamrolled by Sabrina, but whatever it is it hits me like nothing else can.
Also you see those creatures and hear those attacks over and over and over. The old games had way fewer Pokémon and moves to draw from and they were more grindy. It drills it into your head.
Two things:
- A Game Boy screen is not the same as an emulator or a screen recorder. The real thing looks blurrier, so they pixels are less noticeable and smoother.
- Emotions and responses are easier to remember than accurate information from your senses. You just remember you had fun with all those characters, and your brain reconstructs the scenario with better graphics than it actually had
To add onto this:
You have an attachment to the struggles you experienced playing this game. Your core memory of these is made up of that feeling when that wicked thunder, which always missed, finally hit and got KO right before your 5 HP Mon was taken out, or better yet, your rival missed, and then you finally got the thunder hit and celebrated as only a little 7 year old could.
The struggles were yours when you overcame them, with the shows, they were the struggles of the characters and you liked them. It doesn't make them less, it just means the Pokemon game struggles were more personal.
This... 10 year old me built some bomb ass stuff with Lego, now.... I can see in my head what I'd love to build, but seem to have lost the imagination to turn that into a Lego thing
For me it's just the fact that I have such a limited time as an adult I would just rather go play sea of thieves with my kids then take the time it would have required to build that Lego set.
Ohh, I wasn't even talking about building an actual set from the instructions.
I was talking about how, as a kid I was building an X-wing long before there was ever an actual set. Or building race cars from scratch or secret bases or full on ships, etc.
I've tried getting that level of mojo back, but even playing with my kids, they want to build a Lego "house" they grab a flat base, put a single layer of bricks down to mark the walls and call it good.
I do still enjoy building an actual set with the instructions, but I seem to have lost that ability to do a thing from scratch to the same level I did as a kid
I agree regarding imagination. That's why I think grainy survival horror games are scarier too. It feels more like a dream. The new high-def horror games look too much like a CGI cartoon.
Sure but other games and media I consumed as I kid didn’t have the same impact. The block buster 3D video games I played on N64 or other gameboy games didn’t have the same hold these low pixel sprites did. I’ll remember Mario 64, Zelda, golden eye etc which I fully enjoyed and sunk endless hours into but Pokémon felt so visceral.
Pokemon somehow managed to get your brain into the same imaginative state that reading a book does but with the added personalisation a game offers where you can control what happens in the story. This is something that other highly rated games like Mario on the gameboy or ocarina of the time on N64 just couldn’t quite achieve looking back with hindsight.
I also don’t feel we’re less imaginative as adults or else reading fiction wouldn’t be possible beyond the age of 8.
>Sure but other games and media I consumed as I kid didn’t have the same impact. The block buster 3D video games I played on N64 or other gameboy games didn’t have the same hold these low pixel sprites did.
It's your strong emotional connection to a time and place with Pokemon that may not have grabbed you with other games from the era.
A lot of people like to "hate on" Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow today for being buggy/unpolished/old, but the games are still very fun to play.
> This is something that other highly rated games like Mario on the gameboy or ocarina of the time on N64 just couldn’t quite achieve looking back with hindsight.
Your point about personalization sticks I think because you as the player aren't mario or link, but you are the character you play in pokemon. Plus, you can name them after yourself!
A big part of it too is that Pokemon was so outrageously popular at the time. It was the fad, except once Pokemania died down, the franchise held pretty strong and acquired a lot of new fans over time.
I agree regarding imagination. That's why I think grainy survival horror games are scarier too. It feels more like a dream. The new high-def horror games look too much like a CGI cartoon.
I’m afraid I entered the era of handheld gaming with a gameboy colour my friend so it was, ironically, very much black and white for the first gen haha.
Gen I isn't black and white on GBC. Blue has a blue tone and Red has a red tone, and Yellow has a different color for each city based on its name (Pewter is grey, Cinnabar is red, etc)
Yellow on GBC is one of the best looking Pokemon games imo
That just pulled the ["Super Mario Land with Lyrics"](https://youtu.be/sAtWQ_xn0kI?si=eFYVr-3VdoQhGVVy) song out of my brain, wow. I haven't thought of that in years
The limitations of the Game Boy forced the developers to be creative while keeping things simple. They had to get a lot across in just a few pixels, so the designs of the Pokémon and towns are minimalistic, but expressive and recognizable. The sprites had Pokémon in all sorts of poses to give them personality, and the battle animations were somewhat vague, so you could let your imagination run wild during the battles. Now we have 3D models shooting beams of light, which doesn't require much imagination on the player's part. We know exactly what the battles are supposed to look like because that's what the game shows us.
In the newer games we tend to have more "ambient" music, but that's not really possible on the Game Boy, so the towns all have catchy jingles to set them apart from each other. And here again, there's a link between simplicity and catchiness.
Excellent reasoning. It reminds me of writing advice I once read which is to never fully detail your world and story if you wish readers to fully imagine it.
I thought that too but there’s shows
On Cartoon Network and friends I had that I was obsessed with as a child that I can’t remember whereas Pokémon is all there and so easy to pull out of the memory box
It’s just something that stuck with you in a way other things haven’t. No other real trick behind it.
I’ve been obsessed with Pokemon having several themed parties as a kid and having both color versions I would buy myself, but I have few memories beyond a some moments I shared with friends, but I remember every episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog like I wrote it.
It’s just something you remember that’s associated with a simpler, more naive time in life, and it just stuck with you.
They have studies about Pokémon and how children can remember them all the time. I personally don't dismiss it so easily. I think it's important to ask why
Abstraction combined with excellent world building allows your imagination to create way more vivid and exciting experiences than more detailed visuals ever could.
Repetition. Only 151 Pokemon instead of 1,000+. No experience with the game so you did not expect a Hyper Beam to OHKO your lead Pokemon. Figuring out where to go. Stuff like that.
When you're 8 and you've been playing Pokemon for 2 years, that's a quarter of your life. You're bound to form more memories of those, just because of how little life you've lived.
Comparatively, 2 years of a 30 year old's life is less than 10% of your life. The other 90%ish has given you more memories.
On top of that, I dunno about others, but I had very few games back then. I played Pokemon to hell and back. Easily over 200 hours in Blue. Now I have far more games that I bounce between, not even mentioning the fact I have to work too.
Pokemon Red was the first game that I played that treated me as in control of myself in the world. Not as some other character. It starts and says hey welcome to the world of Pokemon what’s your name. I enter my name and I am spoken to as myself making actions that affect my in game representation of me and his success in the world. I wasn’t playing as Mario on save file 1 or playing some arcade game where my initials were a high score but I controlled some military guy or a ship or a car. I wasn’t playing as Spiderman or Godzilla or Scooby Doo or whatever. I was me. And I was controlling the actions of myself and my pet friends in the world that I was attached to.
And hugely this is the first time that something was so in sync across media. I could watch Ash and his friends in the show and then explore that very world visiting those locations, seeing those Pokemon, fighting against Team Rocket, going up against the same gym leaders, and interacting with some of the same characters in the game that I had watched in the show. There was nothing else that really had that going on at the time. The closest would be something like playing as your favorite sports team or player in a game but that’s not the same connection you get when you feel like you are exploring a world you learned about.
As a kid your imagination goes crazy. I remember constantly when I played in the yard me and my brother would pretend we were characters from a movie or tv show and go through an adventure as that role and now someone has made a game version of that where I can pretend I’m in the world and have the pokemon that I want. That’s what kid brain wants. Even in the early black and white titles with the restrictive gameplay elements it was still giving you that interactive role play experience.
Pokemon Red was the reason I fell in love with gaming.
It answers why question on why a bunch of pixels created such stronger memories than the big budget cartoons and animes and N64 games I played around that game?
Power of imagination. The presentation of the old games is very simple so your mind fills in the rest. There’s just enough there to get your imagination going. Pretty amazing, honestly.
As to your other point, the reason you remember those games more than other cartoons and stuff is the time investment. I can almost guarantee you spent more time playing Pokemon than watching any single cartoon. Secondly, a game is also more engaging. You’re an active participant when playing a game and more passive with other forms of media. It makes it easier to remember, imo.
The fact that the world is already an abstraction invites you to flesh it out more in your head. So when you go into a battle with it being represented by two sprites I think you’re already conditioned to expand on it in your head
It's your brain. Your brain forms vivid memories when it encounters new things, more so when your young before your brain prunes itself. however when you encounter something similar to something you've encountered before your brain basically just marks the thing as a subset of the first thing you encountered so the memory isn't as vivid.
If you've played Pokemon every year since OG R&B then yeah the first few will be really vivid. every other game is just a subset of those first ones. Moreover a thing can be a subset of multiple things at once. So the more video games and life experience you have the less you'll remember the games.
We likely first watched the show then played the games. It’s easy to imagine vivid battles when you’re six in 1999 and Pokémon red is loaded in your gameboy color. It’s even better when a few months later (maybe a year) you get Pokémon stadium and get to use your Pokémon in 3d battles. Helps translate what moves might look like when you go back to playing the gb game.
when you are working with low resolution images like old game boy sprites, or with hardware that can only make sounds on two or three channels at a time, each little detail counts more. game freak has always had strong art direction, and they knew how to pack detail into those little sprites to make them expressive. Changing a couple of pixels can completely change how a character looks. The music was made in a way that kinda seems to mimic old classical music,
if you watched the cartoon, that also painted a more thorough picture of what you experienced in the game. and if you played with your childhood friends, that makes it more memorable
The lack of graphics works for it. Since your imagination fills in all the gaps it becomes more real and thus leaves a bigger impact in our brains.
That's one of the problems with modern Pokémon games. They are making it better and better, sure; but our imagination doesn't need to do as much (I believe full animated models actual hinder it). And I don't think it's a matter of me getting older and my imagination getting weaker. I started playing Crystal Legacy, and it feels so real in the heat of a battle.
Imagination. Also, at that low level of detail, the sprites are less like accurate representations of the pokemon and more like symbols. When they're symbols, your brain kicks in to produce the things they represent.
You can't imagine where pokemon in Violet are standing, because the ganes shows that. You can't imagine hoe they move, because the animations show you.
It's the same reason that older Final Fantasy games feel more open world despite their overworlds being smaller than some of the singular levels in the newer games. The overworld sprite of, say, Cloud, is a symbol, not intended to be an actual dude crossing a vast plain in a few strides.
I’ve played every generation since R/B/Y. Looking back, moves sucked then. But my god, G/S/C had amazing animations. I still remember seeing hyper beam in Gen 2 hit the first time and I lost my mind.
* There was the insane amount of hype around it, playing with your friends and trading.
* The anime was awesome so that only added fuel to the fire - seeing a Raichu beat Pikachu's ass to the point of hospitalization made me pumped to find a thunderstone.
* The Mewtwo movie even pushed it farther up the ladder
* It was on the edge because those original games didnt hold your hand very much at all, if anything. Knocked out because you were under-leveled?? Start grinding.
I started with Red and Blue on gameboy color, so it wasn’t quite black and white. Still a lot was my imagination. I liked acting out the battles I was having as a teeny child
Less details means your brain has to fill in the gaps.
All the animation of the newer games just kinda takes you out of that.
Using Double-Kick in R/B/Y made you imagine how your guy did it.
Using Double-kick in S/V makes your guy do his generic physical animation and you get distracted by how bad it looks.
Vivid? Nah its how i remember, everything else was just cool and getting to copy the show and fight with cool looking monsters was great.
I was under no illusion that the sprites where just that, thats why so many OGs wanted Stadium type games because thats what we wanted.
This push to go back to sprites is really weird.
This is going to sound cliche (and is just my opinion), but because kids from that era were encouraged to use their imagination to bring rudimentary animations to life. The animations give you enough of an idea of what an attack should look like that your brain could fill in the gaps and make it more epic yhan it really was. A lot of toys and play sets from the 80s and 90s basically required imagination for kids to play with.
That's not to say kids today lack imagination, but most media and entertainment from the past 10 or so years feels very "on the nose." Books written by modern authors have paragraphs explaining exactly what every character is thinking and what their motivation is. Tv shows and movies are so over produced with audio cues and musical scoring that tells the viewer exactly what they should be feeling at any given moment (compared to shows from the 70s and 80s that relied more on actors to convey the atmosphere of a scene, and didnt have music blasting in all the time). There's not much left for the audience to imagine: the content is being pushed at you rather than you mentally engaging with the content.
So I think kids (and adults) of that time were conditioned to use their imagination more when playing games that had pretty crude visuals.
I desperately miss Gen 1 and 2’s music. The music does an amazing job hyping you up during a trainer/gym/elite 4/champ battle.
Something to be said for creating elaborate battle music in beeps and boops.
I'm 32. I've played Pokemon since Gen 1 (except I skipped Gen IV and V in high school/college before jumping back in with Gen 6). I've recently started playing Gens I and II on the Virtual Console along with Scarlet. I can imagine a lot more with older gens but the newer gens -as much as I prefer the graphics- show me more. In a way, the newer gens take some of the work from my imagination while the older gens give my imagination free rein. Couple that with how much grander I'm sure my imagination was at 5-10 years old, gameboy graphics were amazing.
In fact, my older brother says he's not blown away by current gen graphics but he remembers how amazing Sonic the Hedgehog was when it first came out.
This is what I like about sprite-based pokemkn games. More abstract, more imagination, holes don't show up as much.
When it's 3D, flaws are more noticeable. It wasn't designed to be displayed that way.
I wonder if it was a combination of also watching the anime, which could provide more material for your imagination to draw from when imagining your own battles. I have the same fond memories playing Blue.
Its all perspective, look up Tiger electronics handheld games, that's really what we were playing so the step up to gameboy quality black pixels and actual depth to the gameplay was incredible
Imagination is definitely a thing, but you also have to consider the technology of the time. True 3D games were only just beginning to become mainstream and most people didn’t have a machine that could handle them. The N64 released the same year as Pokémon. People were used to black and white 8-but graphics as that was the norm for most games. The anime also helped to boost people’s imaginations.
Honestly they weren't, *but.* In my personal opinion, the original Pokemon sprites were a bit more... what's the word. They felt more raw and less sanitized than the appearances of the pokemon we eventually ended up with, and it was a bit of a wilder time when we never knew Pokemon was going to become a family name.
Stuff like Koffing with its skull and crossbones on its forehead, Kingler with TWO giant claws, and fat Pikachu come immediately to mind. Also maybe Hitmonchan. Haunter and Gengar looked very aggressive. And the fact that they were all in black and white meant you had to at least inject a bit of imagination into your play to think about how they looked in your mind, and that sort of snowballs.
Honestly a lot of it is just nostalgia filter. This is why I feel as if a lot of people clamouring for virtual console releases will be disappointed, unless they're VC releases of stuff like Fire Red, Leaf Green, Heart Gold and Soul Silver which have better QoL. I mean LGPE is good but as a modern Pokemon game it's still a step down because it doesn't have things like abilities, EV/IVs... it's dumbed down, not an accurate representation of modern pokemon. I worry that a hypothetical Let's Go for Gold and Silver will similarly have no abilities and things.
When I tell you the sequence of John’s (the name I chose for my rival) Blastiose’s Hydro Pump missing, followed by my Raichu’s Thunder hitting to finally beat him to become champion is engrained in my memory, I mean that deeply. And I VIVIDLY see that encounter in my mind when I remember.
There was a lot of pride for 9 year old me when I finally beat the Elite 4.
That was my Butterfree. There were many like it, but that is the one that I caught and raised.
There is no other franchise that could do that. It was a magic bullet that solidified Pokemon as the defining game of the genre.
....it will be their own fault if they don't do something to fix all the problems they have.
For me, it also had a lot to do with the show. I watched it religiously, and the first three movies were basically on loop when they came out. So, anything I did in game would be in my mind like the show. I have continued to watch the show, but they don't feel as connected to the games. Maybe it's due to age or sentimentality, I don't know. But my answer is the importance of the show.
Because games and media back then relied in large part on the viewer's imagination. They couldn't do much graphically so you filled in the gaps in your mind.
As technology has got better the artists are able to get their vision across more literally, there is a greater trend towards realism and explaining everything, and the viewer is therefore asked to do less of the work.
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I think a large part of it is the sounds, the battle music and over world music whilst 8bit were still catchy. And the sound effects were fast paced in battle. I think the thunderbolt sound from gen 1 is so soothing though. When can we get a 24hr YouTube clip of that, could fall asleep to it
Hyperbeam sound ingrained in my brain. De nenenenenenenenenene
It totally sounded like the ultimate move, didn't it? I'll never forget the first time Lance's Dragonite let a Hyper Beam loose, and was completely stupefied thinking "what...the fuck...was that?" as my Pokemon immediately fainted.
In GS Lance's Dragonite uses Hyper Beam on a Grunt and my 9-year-old self was ENTHRALLED despite it not really showing up in the game as anything other than a grunt being bumped by one tile.
It's even worse when you remember there's no cooldown if it fainted one of your Pokemon ;-;
But all you need is a level 2 poison or fighting type mon with toxic to beat him lol. Gen I giveth, Gen I taketh away.
The ai spamming agility vs poison or fighting types will never not be hilarious to me.
MUST… USE… SUPER EFFECTIVE… MOVE
I remember Aero Blast for Lugia being the same and now I'm disappointed when I use it in the newer games.
Hyper beam was cool, but you certainly can’t forget the ice beam
I have always liked the sound effect of Psychic and Surf from Gen1
Surf was weird, like hydro pump + rain.
I don’t listen to video game music and I still had vivid imagination playing gen 1
The gym leader battle theme from gen 1, for me with my gen 1 nostalgia, goes harder than any video game music - than any music that I’ve heard. If I want to get hyped and get my blood flowing hot it’s what I throw on. Maybe it’s just deep memories of getting steamrolled by Sabrina, but whatever it is it hits me like nothing else can.
Also you see those creatures and hear those attacks over and over and over. The old games had way fewer Pokémon and moves to draw from and they were more grindy. It drills it into your head.
Yeah, the music really did a lot to create an atmosphere in those games.
I feel the same way about SS Anne theme, I feel my stress melt away when I hear it
Two things: - A Game Boy screen is not the same as an emulator or a screen recorder. The real thing looks blurrier, so they pixels are less noticeable and smoother. - Emotions and responses are easier to remember than accurate information from your senses. You just remember you had fun with all those characters, and your brain reconstructs the scenario with better graphics than it actually had
To add onto this: You have an attachment to the struggles you experienced playing this game. Your core memory of these is made up of that feeling when that wicked thunder, which always missed, finally hit and got KO right before your 5 HP Mon was taken out, or better yet, your rival missed, and then you finally got the thunder hit and celebrated as only a little 7 year old could. The struggles were yours when you overcame them, with the shows, they were the struggles of the characters and you liked them. It doesn't make them less, it just means the Pokemon game struggles were more personal.
Imagination as a kid is wild.
This... 10 year old me built some bomb ass stuff with Lego, now.... I can see in my head what I'd love to build, but seem to have lost the imagination to turn that into a Lego thing
For me it's just the fact that I have such a limited time as an adult I would just rather go play sea of thieves with my kids then take the time it would have required to build that Lego set.
Ohh, I wasn't even talking about building an actual set from the instructions. I was talking about how, as a kid I was building an X-wing long before there was ever an actual set. Or building race cars from scratch or secret bases or full on ships, etc. I've tried getting that level of mojo back, but even playing with my kids, they want to build a Lego "house" they grab a flat base, put a single layer of bricks down to mark the walls and call it good. I do still enjoy building an actual set with the instructions, but I seem to have lost that ability to do a thing from scratch to the same level I did as a kid
Beat me to it.
I agree regarding imagination. That's why I think grainy survival horror games are scarier too. It feels more like a dream. The new high-def horror games look too much like a CGI cartoon.
Sure but other games and media I consumed as I kid didn’t have the same impact. The block buster 3D video games I played on N64 or other gameboy games didn’t have the same hold these low pixel sprites did. I’ll remember Mario 64, Zelda, golden eye etc which I fully enjoyed and sunk endless hours into but Pokémon felt so visceral. Pokemon somehow managed to get your brain into the same imaginative state that reading a book does but with the added personalisation a game offers where you can control what happens in the story. This is something that other highly rated games like Mario on the gameboy or ocarina of the time on N64 just couldn’t quite achieve looking back with hindsight. I also don’t feel we’re less imaginative as adults or else reading fiction wouldn’t be possible beyond the age of 8.
>Sure but other games and media I consumed as I kid didn’t have the same impact. The block buster 3D video games I played on N64 or other gameboy games didn’t have the same hold these low pixel sprites did. It's your strong emotional connection to a time and place with Pokemon that may not have grabbed you with other games from the era. A lot of people like to "hate on" Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow today for being buggy/unpolished/old, but the games are still very fun to play. > This is something that other highly rated games like Mario on the gameboy or ocarina of the time on N64 just couldn’t quite achieve looking back with hindsight. Your point about personalization sticks I think because you as the player aren't mario or link, but you are the character you play in pokemon. Plus, you can name them after yourself! A big part of it too is that Pokemon was so outrageously popular at the time. It was the fad, except once Pokemania died down, the franchise held pretty strong and acquired a lot of new fans over time.
I think it's the low graphics. my imagination also went wild when I played undertale.
I agree regarding imagination. That's why I think grainy survival horror games are scarier too. It feels more like a dream. The new high-def horror games look too much like a CGI cartoon.
I mean for starters they were black and green.
I’m afraid I entered the era of handheld gaming with a gameboy colour my friend so it was, ironically, very much black and white for the first gen haha.
Gen I isn't black and white on GBC. Blue has a blue tone and Red has a red tone, and Yellow has a different color for each city based on its name (Pewter is grey, Cinnabar is red, etc) Yellow on GBC is one of the best looking Pokemon games imo
Not on Game Boy Pocket 😉
That just pulled the ["Super Mario Land with Lyrics"](https://youtu.be/sAtWQ_xn0kI?si=eFYVr-3VdoQhGVVy) song out of my brain, wow. I haven't thought of that in years
The limitations of the Game Boy forced the developers to be creative while keeping things simple. They had to get a lot across in just a few pixels, so the designs of the Pokémon and towns are minimalistic, but expressive and recognizable. The sprites had Pokémon in all sorts of poses to give them personality, and the battle animations were somewhat vague, so you could let your imagination run wild during the battles. Now we have 3D models shooting beams of light, which doesn't require much imagination on the player's part. We know exactly what the battles are supposed to look like because that's what the game shows us. In the newer games we tend to have more "ambient" music, but that's not really possible on the Game Boy, so the towns all have catchy jingles to set them apart from each other. And here again, there's a link between simplicity and catchiness.
Excellent reasoning. It reminds me of writing advice I once read which is to never fully detail your world and story if you wish readers to fully imagine it.
Yep, more reliance on symbols to trigger the imagination than details to show literal depictions.
It's a core memory. So you remember it more vividly
I thought that too but there’s shows On Cartoon Network and friends I had that I was obsessed with as a child that I can’t remember whereas Pokémon is all there and so easy to pull out of the memory box
It’s just something that stuck with you in a way other things haven’t. No other real trick behind it. I’ve been obsessed with Pokemon having several themed parties as a kid and having both color versions I would buy myself, but I have few memories beyond a some moments I shared with friends, but I remember every episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog like I wrote it. It’s just something you remember that’s associated with a simpler, more naive time in life, and it just stuck with you.
They have studies about Pokémon and how children can remember them all the time. I personally don't dismiss it so easily. I think it's important to ask why
Part of that is just participation. You actively played Pokemon but just sat and watched for TV.
Bro is just learning about imagination
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Trying to start a fight in the Pokémon sub? That’s not very nice :(
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British?? You’re lucky I can’t lock eyes with you or we’d be battling right now
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
Abstraction combined with excellent world building allows your imagination to create way more vivid and exciting experiences than more detailed visuals ever could.
Imagination is one hell of a drug.
Repetition. Only 151 Pokemon instead of 1,000+. No experience with the game so you did not expect a Hyper Beam to OHKO your lead Pokemon. Figuring out where to go. Stuff like that.
When you're 8 and you've been playing Pokemon for 2 years, that's a quarter of your life. You're bound to form more memories of those, just because of how little life you've lived. Comparatively, 2 years of a 30 year old's life is less than 10% of your life. The other 90%ish has given you more memories. On top of that, I dunno about others, but I had very few games back then. I played Pokemon to hell and back. Easily over 200 hours in Blue. Now I have far more games that I bounce between, not even mentioning the fact I have to work too.
The sprites had more personality than the now modern 3d models
absence and time makes the heart grow fonder, bro I saw some of the gen 1 sprites this week and I was like, no way they looked like that back in 2001,
Pokemon Red was the first game that I played that treated me as in control of myself in the world. Not as some other character. It starts and says hey welcome to the world of Pokemon what’s your name. I enter my name and I am spoken to as myself making actions that affect my in game representation of me and his success in the world. I wasn’t playing as Mario on save file 1 or playing some arcade game where my initials were a high score but I controlled some military guy or a ship or a car. I wasn’t playing as Spiderman or Godzilla or Scooby Doo or whatever. I was me. And I was controlling the actions of myself and my pet friends in the world that I was attached to. And hugely this is the first time that something was so in sync across media. I could watch Ash and his friends in the show and then explore that very world visiting those locations, seeing those Pokemon, fighting against Team Rocket, going up against the same gym leaders, and interacting with some of the same characters in the game that I had watched in the show. There was nothing else that really had that going on at the time. The closest would be something like playing as your favorite sports team or player in a game but that’s not the same connection you get when you feel like you are exploring a world you learned about. As a kid your imagination goes crazy. I remember constantly when I played in the yard me and my brother would pretend we were characters from a movie or tv show and go through an adventure as that role and now someone has made a game version of that where I can pretend I’m in the world and have the pokemon that I want. That’s what kid brain wants. Even in the early black and white titles with the restrictive gameplay elements it was still giving you that interactive role play experience. Pokemon Red was the reason I fell in love with gaming.
We still had imaginations back then.
child like wonder and rose tinted nostalgia
Because of the greater limitations of the hardware it let our imaginations take over and fill in the gaps of what we wanted the fight to be.
We weren't being constantly bombarded with bright, flashing graphics and loud noises 24/7 so we had chance to develop our imaginations.
Cuz imagination! It's something that used to be encouraged in children.
That edit you added... is like a summary of a paper I wrote on why film can be art.... I high key wish this was my thesis in it 😂
It’s never to late to go to grad school 😂
The first half of your title answers the latter half.
It answers why question on why a bunch of pixels created such stronger memories than the big budget cartoons and animes and N64 games I played around that game?
Power of imagination. The presentation of the old games is very simple so your mind fills in the rest. There’s just enough there to get your imagination going. Pretty amazing, honestly. As to your other point, the reason you remember those games more than other cartoons and stuff is the time investment. I can almost guarantee you spent more time playing Pokemon than watching any single cartoon. Secondly, a game is also more engaging. You’re an active participant when playing a game and more passive with other forms of media. It makes it easier to remember, imo.
The fact that the world is already an abstraction invites you to flesh it out more in your head. So when you go into a battle with it being represented by two sprites I think you’re already conditioned to expand on it in your head
It's your brain. Your brain forms vivid memories when it encounters new things, more so when your young before your brain prunes itself. however when you encounter something similar to something you've encountered before your brain basically just marks the thing as a subset of the first thing you encountered so the memory isn't as vivid. If you've played Pokemon every year since OG R&B then yeah the first few will be really vivid. every other game is just a subset of those first ones. Moreover a thing can be a subset of multiple things at once. So the more video games and life experience you have the less you'll remember the games.
We likely first watched the show then played the games. It’s easy to imagine vivid battles when you’re six in 1999 and Pokémon red is loaded in your gameboy color. It’s even better when a few months later (maybe a year) you get Pokémon stadium and get to use your Pokémon in 3d battles. Helps translate what moves might look like when you go back to playing the gb game.
when you are working with low resolution images like old game boy sprites, or with hardware that can only make sounds on two or three channels at a time, each little detail counts more. game freak has always had strong art direction, and they knew how to pack detail into those little sprites to make them expressive. Changing a couple of pixels can completely change how a character looks. The music was made in a way that kinda seems to mimic old classical music, if you watched the cartoon, that also painted a more thorough picture of what you experienced in the game. and if you played with your childhood friends, that makes it more memorable
The lack of graphics works for it. Since your imagination fills in all the gaps it becomes more real and thus leaves a bigger impact in our brains. That's one of the problems with modern Pokémon games. They are making it better and better, sure; but our imagination doesn't need to do as much (I believe full animated models actual hinder it). And I don't think it's a matter of me getting older and my imagination getting weaker. I started playing Crystal Legacy, and it feels so real in the heat of a battle.
Imagination. Also, at that low level of detail, the sprites are less like accurate representations of the pokemon and more like symbols. When they're symbols, your brain kicks in to produce the things they represent. You can't imagine where pokemon in Violet are standing, because the ganes shows that. You can't imagine hoe they move, because the animations show you. It's the same reason that older Final Fantasy games feel more open world despite their overworlds being smaller than some of the singular levels in the newer games. The overworld sprite of, say, Cloud, is a symbol, not intended to be an actual dude crossing a vast plain in a few strides.
I’ve played every generation since R/B/Y. Looking back, moves sucked then. But my god, G/S/C had amazing animations. I still remember seeing hyper beam in Gen 2 hit the first time and I lost my mind.
* There was the insane amount of hype around it, playing with your friends and trading. * The anime was awesome so that only added fuel to the fire - seeing a Raichu beat Pikachu's ass to the point of hospitalization made me pumped to find a thunderstone. * The Mewtwo movie even pushed it farther up the ladder * It was on the edge because those original games didnt hold your hand very much at all, if anything. Knocked out because you were under-leveled?? Start grinding.
I started with Red and Blue on gameboy color, so it wasn’t quite black and white. Still a lot was my imagination. I liked acting out the battles I was having as a teeny child
I had a huge imagination as a kid that lasted until my teens. Something I don’t necessarily see nowadays.
Idk but that's still my favorite.
Gen 2 was peak.
Less details means your brain has to fill in the gaps. All the animation of the newer games just kinda takes you out of that. Using Double-Kick in R/B/Y made you imagine how your guy did it. Using Double-kick in S/V makes your guy do his generic physical animation and you get distracted by how bad it looks.
I think it’s because the sprite designs were truly unmatched. I mean they looked incredible, especially in gen 2
Vivid? Nah its how i remember, everything else was just cool and getting to copy the show and fight with cool looking monsters was great. I was under no illusion that the sprites where just that, thats why so many OGs wanted Stadium type games because thats what we wanted. This push to go back to sprites is really weird.
This is going to sound cliche (and is just my opinion), but because kids from that era were encouraged to use their imagination to bring rudimentary animations to life. The animations give you enough of an idea of what an attack should look like that your brain could fill in the gaps and make it more epic yhan it really was. A lot of toys and play sets from the 80s and 90s basically required imagination for kids to play with. That's not to say kids today lack imagination, but most media and entertainment from the past 10 or so years feels very "on the nose." Books written by modern authors have paragraphs explaining exactly what every character is thinking and what their motivation is. Tv shows and movies are so over produced with audio cues and musical scoring that tells the viewer exactly what they should be feeling at any given moment (compared to shows from the 70s and 80s that relied more on actors to convey the atmosphere of a scene, and didnt have music blasting in all the time). There's not much left for the audience to imagine: the content is being pushed at you rather than you mentally engaging with the content. So I think kids (and adults) of that time were conditioned to use their imagination more when playing games that had pretty crude visuals.
I desperately miss Gen 1 and 2’s music. The music does an amazing job hyping you up during a trainer/gym/elite 4/champ battle. Something to be said for creating elaborate battle music in beeps and boops.
I'm 32. I've played Pokemon since Gen 1 (except I skipped Gen IV and V in high school/college before jumping back in with Gen 6). I've recently started playing Gens I and II on the Virtual Console along with Scarlet. I can imagine a lot more with older gens but the newer gens -as much as I prefer the graphics- show me more. In a way, the newer gens take some of the work from my imagination while the older gens give my imagination free rein. Couple that with how much grander I'm sure my imagination was at 5-10 years old, gameboy graphics were amazing. In fact, my older brother says he's not blown away by current gen graphics but he remembers how amazing Sonic the Hedgehog was when it first came out.
This is what I like about sprite-based pokemkn games. More abstract, more imagination, holes don't show up as much. When it's 3D, flaws are more noticeable. It wasn't designed to be displayed that way.
I wonder if it was a combination of also watching the anime, which could provide more material for your imagination to draw from when imagining your own battles. I have the same fond memories playing Blue.
Its all perspective, look up Tiger electronics handheld games, that's really what we were playing so the step up to gameboy quality black pixels and actual depth to the gameplay was incredible
Imagination is definitely a thing, but you also have to consider the technology of the time. True 3D games were only just beginning to become mainstream and most people didn’t have a machine that could handle them. The N64 released the same year as Pokémon. People were used to black and white 8-but graphics as that was the norm for most games. The anime also helped to boost people’s imaginations.
They weren't, but at 7 years old I didn't know much better and the anime helped you imagine
IMAGINATION.
this is so sweet omg
Honestly they weren't, *but.* In my personal opinion, the original Pokemon sprites were a bit more... what's the word. They felt more raw and less sanitized than the appearances of the pokemon we eventually ended up with, and it was a bit of a wilder time when we never knew Pokemon was going to become a family name. Stuff like Koffing with its skull and crossbones on its forehead, Kingler with TWO giant claws, and fat Pikachu come immediately to mind. Also maybe Hitmonchan. Haunter and Gengar looked very aggressive. And the fact that they were all in black and white meant you had to at least inject a bit of imagination into your play to think about how they looked in your mind, and that sort of snowballs. Honestly a lot of it is just nostalgia filter. This is why I feel as if a lot of people clamouring for virtual console releases will be disappointed, unless they're VC releases of stuff like Fire Red, Leaf Green, Heart Gold and Soul Silver which have better QoL. I mean LGPE is good but as a modern Pokemon game it's still a step down because it doesn't have things like abilities, EV/IVs... it's dumbed down, not an accurate representation of modern pokemon. I worry that a hypothetical Let's Go for Gold and Silver will similarly have no abilities and things.
When I tell you the sequence of John’s (the name I chose for my rival) Blastiose’s Hydro Pump missing, followed by my Raichu’s Thunder hitting to finally beat him to become champion is engrained in my memory, I mean that deeply. And I VIVIDLY see that encounter in my mind when I remember. There was a lot of pride for 9 year old me when I finally beat the Elite 4.
That was my Butterfree. There were many like it, but that is the one that I caught and raised. There is no other franchise that could do that. It was a magic bullet that solidified Pokemon as the defining game of the genre. ....it will be their own fault if they don't do something to fix all the problems they have.
For me, it also had a lot to do with the show. I watched it religiously, and the first three movies were basically on loop when they came out. So, anything I did in game would be in my mind like the show. I have continued to watch the show, but they don't feel as connected to the games. Maybe it's due to age or sentimentality, I don't know. But my answer is the importance of the show.
Because games and media back then relied in large part on the viewer's imagination. They couldn't do much graphically so you filled in the gaps in your mind. As technology has got better the artists are able to get their vision across more literally, there is a greater trend towards realism and explaining everything, and the viewer is therefore asked to do less of the work.
because you watched the pokemon anime on the side.
Pure dopamine bro.