#64. Y2K (Friday, December 31, 1999)

#64. Y2K (Friday, December 31, 1999)

What was your best day…of playing/watching something for the first time ever, not knowing what was coming next?

I suppose everyone of a certain age remembers where they were on this day, counting down and watching the ball drop of television while the fear remained at the back of their mind that the whole computer infrastructure of the world was going to collapse the moment it hit the bottom.

I’ll admit that at the time I had no understanding whatsoever of these Y2K implications. Either my parents and teachers didn’t think it was a big deal or I was being willfully ignorant, probably both. The only thing I really had in mind during that time was, as the date suggests…wait for it…Pokemon. (#82 may have spoiled you.)

Except now, instead of cards (which I was still collecting, albeit less fervently1), it was the video games (specifically, Pokemon Red); for which my dad and I had spent one full night a month earlier setting up the emulator on our computer. Well, my addiction levels to playing that game went up pretty quickly, and so naturally after a few days my parents restricted my playing to just a few hours every week2.

I had a bit of extra playing time during the Christmas break, but I wasted most of it running around aimlessly not knowing how to proceed with the new Cut ability I just got3. Finally, I find that little corner of the map where you cut the tree down to progress4…but then half an hour later my mom comes down to shut down my gaming privileges. This time the conflict escalates, and ends with her permanently banning my Pokemon-playing: under the (correct) premise that even when I’m not playing I’m “thinking” about playing instead of studying, etc.

So on New Year’s Eve, after my Dad and I go to Costco to buy a printer (for some reason), and I draw a Paras, I have an argument ready for my mom. I say: “Well, since you banned me from Pokemon a couple a days ago, I obviously haven’t been thinking about it since I can’t play; so there’s no harm in letting me play now.”

For some reason, that worked.5

So for the last four hours of the millennium, I play. And now that I know where the heck I’m going, I go far. All the way to Celadon City, beating the fourth gym leader, and getting into the Rocket Game Corner. Keep in mind that I had no spoilers for any of this, so exploring the original Pokemon Red game piece-by-piece fresh with no idea what was coming next was such an awesome experience. The kind of thing where I wish someone could just wipe all my memory of Pokemon so I could experience it all over again.

Then Y2K came and went, the world didn’t end, and my first ever Pokemon save file was still intact. (Until two weeks later, when we had another argument and my dad went and deleted it permanently.)

  1. A few weeks ago, right before Christmas, my mom came home with a huge box of cards from her co-worker, who apparently had a huge collection but only cared about the rare cards. So the box had a whole bunch of the less valuable common and uncommon cards from those first three sets. I ended up being forced to “share” and give a good chunk of these cards to family friends…but I made sure I kept the good ones. In return a month later, I gave the co-worker my Base Set Electrode that he had been eyeing.
  2. Except once when Harry (#82) was over for a school report, while doing “research” on the basement computer we instead played Pokemon all afternoon. We went all the way from Mt. Moon to right before Vermilion City that day – huge progress for two nine-year-olds.
  3. The internet was around in that time, but I guess the prevailing search engine of choice, AltaVista, wasn’t getting the job done.
  4. Man, those old Pokemon games could be annoyingly difficult.
  5. Though I think my mom may have just wanted me to have some fun on New Year’s Eve.