When Pokémon Red and Blue first released in America, I was five years old. I have a few memories from earlier in my life that are mostly limited to still pictures in my head, but my earliest clear memory of a video game is seeing an advertisement for Pokémon in what I can only assume was Toys"R"Us. It was a stand-up display featuring the official artwork of Charizard and Blastoise. I can't really string all my memories of the game together into a cohesive timeline, but there are a couple of things that I know for sure.

My parents bought both Red and Blue version for me and my sister. I can only imagine why they did this since my sister was just two years old at the time and can't possibly have been able to play the game, but I remember playing both of them. We ended up playing Pokémon Blue so much that the CMOS battery in the cartridge died and couldn't retain save data anymore.

I obviously played the first generation a lot, but the second generation with Pokémon Gold and Silver is more my speed. Pokémon Gold (my sister got Silver) taught me a harsh lesson about how daylight savings worked. When I asked my mom if it was daylight savings time, she said it almost was, so I told the game that it was. That save file would permanently be one hour off of the real world's time for the whole time I played the game.

There are so many stories I can tell about Pokémon, but that could take forever. There were hours upon hours watching the anime (and years later getting excited when Ash's voice actress would go on to voice my favorite Fire Emblem character), and the time playing the Trading Card Game was banned at my school because the older kids would always win against the younger kids. There was discovering the cloning glitch by turning the game off at the exact right moment while saving, interrupting the data moving around. That was the first time I ever thought of a game as a system - a computer program that could be exploited (or modified).

Pokémon was the progenitor for so many things that I love about video games to this day, and I'm not sure where I would be without it.