With the release of “Pokemon: Alpha Ruby” and “Pokemon: Omega Sapphire” just around the corner, I got to thinking about why I really got into the games in the first place, and what they taught me about myself.

My Gameboy Color was my toy of choice when I was younger. But there was one game that stuck with me and really effected my life- “Pokemon Blue Version”.

I remember watching the first commercial on “Kids WB” after school. It took them less than thirty seconds for me to believe that a pokemon game was like Christmas, my Birthday and the best weekend of my life all rolled into one.

There was nothing else I wanted other than that and it was the same for my older brother: We watched the show, we played with the cards- All we needed was the game and our 5 and 6 year old lives would be complete.

We got our wish on Christmas, and within minutes, I was playing “Pokemon Blue Version” on the Gameboy Color. I was hooked.

I still remember the first pokemon I caught. It was a level 2 Pidgey. The lowest level pokemon you could have in-game. I felt sorry for it, so I caught it and vowed to raise it to level 100 (which I did).

I also remember getting completely lost in Mt. Moon and developing my hatred for Zubats.

As to what this actually taught me about myself, it taught me several things.

For one, it taught me you are never too young to go out and chase your dreams. The main characters in Pokemon are around ten years old according to the developers. It really reinforced the fact that if I wanted to do something, I shouldn’t let the idea of me being “too young” or “too old” or “too inexperienced” get to me. If I wanted to go and learn martial arts, I could. If I wanted to go to college and figure out my future, why not start as soon as I can and go figure it out. If I wanted to train pokemon, I’m gonna grab a copy of my game and train some pokemon.

It also taught me that things will get in your way, and you may have to stand up for yourself. In-game, there were other trainers, gangs and even mob bosses that would try and stop you from being a master trainer. In most situations, you would have to fight them with your pokemon in a battle. But to me, I felt powerful in standing up for myself in that game, and in some ways, I carried that self-confidence with me into the real world.

It taught me to be compassionate. To do things for others, even if you know you will get nothing in return. There were a lot of situations in the game where you had to save the town or even the world. Yeah, a lot could translate that into just getting through the game, but to me it was a lot deeper than that. In real-life, it’s easy to choose the easy way out- it’s easy to just be ignorant. But in Pokemon, you couldn’t be, you as the player wanted to be a part of this world, and therefore, you had to care about it to some extent. A good example of compassion in the game is the Pokemon tower sequence. You may have just traveled to Lavender Town and walked through the pokemon graveyard just to get the pokeflute from Mr. Fuji, but if you were paying attention would have also met the dead mother Marowak along the way. You know that this pokemon was killed by Team Rocket and that she had a little Cubone who is all alone now because of it. In a way, that’s all you needed to know, that certainly made me want to defeat the nefarious gang at that point.

Finally, Pokemon helped me realize that I’m a bit of a perfectionist. With the catchphrase of “gotta catch ‘em all”, they really gave the player a sense of urgency- to be a master, you had to catch them all. I never actually did that until much later- it took me buying several versions of the game to actually complete that mission. But in real life I guess that translated into me always wanting to do the best for myself, even if it meant doing something that seemed really hard to do at the time.

Because deep down inside, I know I want to be the very best. Like no one ever was.