Pokemon Nightmare Stories

Easter Egg - Snow on Mt. Silver

So, my brother and I, we kind of grew up on Pokémon. Around here a lot of kids did. It worked out perfectly for us, too - every time a new gen came out one of us would get one version, one of us would get the other, and since our mom liked to spoil us, we both got the 3rd one.

This is going to sound, at first, like a bittersweet story about two siblings who grow up with a couple of games that eventually take them down two different roads... Well, it's a little more than that.

The years rolled by, we kept collecting. Gameboys got old; we replaced them. Cartridges finally gave out, we picked up new copies. But we started down two completely different roads before Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald came out. See, around then my brother got a GameShark. We had heard all the hacks and cheats you could do with them, even if we were kind of late to the party, and they sounded awfully cool.

Our first guinea pig cartridge was my brother's old Blue version. We just dicked around with it a little bit, nothing major. But whatever we did fucked the cartridge up. After just a couple of code entries, it glitched out completely and became unplayable. Naturally we were upset at first; my brother mourned the loss of his hours of work, and I was sympathetic. I told him, "It's okay, we can replace it I guess. Stupid shark was a waste of money."

But here our paths finally differed. After seeing the mess it had turned Blue version into, I had become opposed to the idea of hacking or cheating any of my games. (What can I say? I'm a chick. I feel feelings for the little pixel-critters.) At least with that GameShark. But my brother had taken his game's destruction as a personal challenge or something - I don't think he ever played a game after that which wasn't hacked somehow. Yeah, we played a shit ton of Pokémon, man. But for us there really wasn't much else to do; we live way out in the country without many other kids, and the farmers didn't want us on their property... so... we played Pokémon out on the lawn just about all day, every day. It was pretty awesome to us, at least. We lost the GameShark when our rooms got moved around. A new addition was built onto our house and it disappeared in the mess of shit that got stuffed into the new closet.

Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald arrived, and after playing through them once we were both in agreement that they were definitely lacking in comparison to the last gen. We both tried another honest play-through, and though we managed to finish, it left us both yearning for some good old-fashioned nostalgia. Where were our old Gold, Silver, and Crystal cartridges though? It took us probably a month to dig through the boxes we'd been too lazy to open up before, but we finally found one full of a shitload of all our old electronics: My old purple Gameboy Color still worked, his red one could no longer hold batteries in place.

Both of our GBAs were fine, though, along with our snakelights and link cables, that one with the nifty little connector in the middle that I had always wrapped up oh-so-carefully to avoid fraying the wires and condemning it to the trash like our last cable. We both grabbed up everything we could. It was so nice to have Yellow (which had been my first and most cherished game of any series, not just Pokémon) and Red and Gold back.

We went through the motions of checking our old files, taking in all the old memories, and eventually we figured the gen 1 stuff was just too nostalgic to get rid of. I restarted Gold, he restarted Silver. Immediately he snatched the GameShark out of the box and slipped it into the back of his GBA. I just shook my head at him. I remember what I said to him.

"That thing will kill your game, you know."

He never had liked me preaching to him about 'abusing pixels.' I shut my mouth after that, but it had put him off from playing with me. I guess it was just one time too many or something; I oughta know to keep my thoughts to myself, really...

It was a couple of days later that it happened. I was out on the porch, Gameboy in-hand, just about to go into the Elite 4 when I realized I needed a little help. My team was ill-balanced thanks to my playing through for leisure, and at the time I was no great trainer that could pull off gimmick runs. I knew that my brother had been two badges ahead of me when we'd last checked with one another, so I was hoping maybe he'd let me borrow a Pokémon or two just for this run-through.