#143. Ruby and Sapphire (Monday, July 21, 2003)

What was your best day…of pure gaming?

I believe this is the only entry across either list where I don’t ever leave my bedroom (at least for the relevant parts). Because the story for this one is pretty simple: I decide I want to play Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, I download an emulator to play it on my computer, and I do nothing but play it for a full week.

It gets most of its value from being a direct continuation of the greatest three-week summer of my life to that point: a weeklong visit from old best friend David Huang (#49), followed by two action-packed weeks at arguably one of the best sports camps in the country (#45, with a few odd adventures along the way). I must’ve approached this week, staying home all alone while my parents were at work and my brother at some (likely Chinese) summer camp, thinking: “Well, I’ve had my fun for the summer. There can’t be anything else exciting out there.”

I mean, I knew about Ruby and Sapphire, because Dalek—my best friend during sports camp (who got really weird near the end with his invisible gremlins (#45)—had brought his Game Boy Advance. And for the last few days of the camp, I would ditch the afternoon swim just to watch him play Pokémon Ruby, the flagship third generation title, continuously.

Leading up to this, Pokémon had been facing an extended dormancy period in my and the public’s consciousness. Following the initial fad (#139, #84, #67), which spanned the release of Gold and Silver (second generation) and the end fifth grade, Pokémon entered a period of intense backlash—where it suddenly became uncool, for children of a certain age range (fairly wide range, but the eleven to twelve cohort I was in was definitely peak). And so, just seeing a new game come out, with a whole universe of new gameplay and Pokémon and mechanics, and with graphics that were at another level, pulled me back in violently. A wanted to play this game.

The thing is, after going through a fairly complicated emulator software set-up (with my dad’s help) just to play the Game Boy Color Pokémon Gold and Silver two years ago, I had no reason to believe that the much more advanced Game Boy Advance engine could be replicated on my computer.

Well, as I found out pretty quickly that Monday morning, yes it could. The technology had improved so much that all I needed to do was download Visual Boy Advance and a ROM for Pokémon Ruby, and I could just play the game I’d been longing to play (for one week) non-stop with the crispest of visuals and game speed. Like, how was I even able to access this incredible technology so easily?

The rest of the week goes as you’d expect. I play, and play, and play. And now that I’m not a spatially-challenged, literal-minded nine-year-old anymore—only a slightly less eleven-year-old form of that—and these games are slightly more intuitive, I progress through it at a much more productive pace. Not rushed, though. I take my time to savor the environment, talking to each NPC, exploring each area to catch every weird new Pokémon available, and overall immersing myself in this new brightly-colored and graphically clean new region of Hoenn.

And the new Pokémon is the best part. Unlike with previous games, I do not know any of these Pokémon coming in. So, I’m literally going in blind. Seeing new creatures at every route, trying to guess their types and power levels based on my own (often inaccurate) visual heuristics, and basically forming my understanding of this new generation piece by piece in the way it’s most meant to be formed—no spoilers, no alternate media (like cards or the anime), but just playing the core game on my own from start to finish.

Pokémon Ruby becomes the defining game for the rest of my summer. The franchise was back! At least for me, if not for everybody else.