#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, for the relevant parts, I never leave my bedroom. The story is pretty simple: I decide I want to play Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, download an emulator, and spend the entire week playing.

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 was at 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 (#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.

Leading up to this, Pokémon had faded considerably from both my consciousness and the broader culture. Following the initial fad (#139, #84, #67), which lasted through Gold and Silver and the end of fifth grade, Pokémon entered a period of intense backlash. For kids around my age, it had suddenly become uncool. And so, just seeing a new game come out, with a whole world of Pokémon, mechanics, and gameplay, and with graphics that were at another level, pulled me back in violently. I wanted to play this game.

The thing is, after going through a fairly complicated emulator setup (with my dad’s help) just to play the Game Boy Color Pokémon Gold and Silver two years earlier, I had no reason to assume a much more advanced Game Boy Advance game could run 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 crisp visuals and none of the clunkiness I expected. 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 better eleven-year-old form of that—and these games are slightly more intuitive, I progress through the game 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 region of Hoenn.

And the new Pokémon are 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 building my understanding of this new generation piece by piece in what felt like the ideal way—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.