The original Pokémon games came to America in 1998, inspiring legions of kids to fastidiously spend hours bent over Game Boys to be the very best Pokémon Trainer.
It's been 15 years since Pokémon Red and Blue, as we approach the release of Pokémon X and Y for the Nintendo 3DS, and it's amazing how much gaming technology has improved. The pixelated sprites that once represented our beloved creatures have now been replaced with full-on 3D models.
See also: 'Pokémon X' and 'Y' Are Polished But Play It Too Safe
We wanted to look back on our nostalgia for the original games, and see exactly how much has changed — and how much is still the same. What are your favorite Pokémon memories? Share them in the comments below.
Want to trade or battle Pokémon with your friends? Before the age of wireless, you'd need a Game Boy link cable, leaving a spacious 3 feet between both players.
This generation of Pokémon uses the 3DS Wi-Fi as well as Near Field Communication to allow players to battle easily with those nearby or across the globe.
That's not to say the link cable didn't have its perks. One of the biggest benefits was the fact you could use it to clone Pokémon.
Each copy of the game never included all the Pokémon available, so that sometimes meant trading with friends. But if you both wanted to keep a copy of the ultra-rare Mew you caught, you could trick the system. Since link cables could only send data one way at a time, unplugging it at the right time meant both players got to keep the Pokémon, while the one it was being swapped for disappeared into the ether.
There have been glitches in several generations of Pokémon games that allowed players to clone creatures, but they seem to have been ironed out in modern games, meaning you'll never really complete a full set again.
The first Pokémon games were made by small teams, with much less support than they have now. Pokémon Red/Blue contained a particularly strange glitch in which you could catch a broken piece of code dubbed "Missingno." by the community. It had moves, stats and a cry like a real Pokémon, but looked like a broken piece of code.
It was appealing to hunt a Missingno because it would cause the game to replicate the item held in a specific slot. It's still one of the most famous game glitches of all time.
Now it's nice to see the Pokémon games have ironed out their bugs, but one can't help feeling nostalgic for weirdness like this.
Is that really a Charmeleon? It looks like a hippo with a party hat.
Back in the day, players needed to use a lot of imagination to turn those blocky sprites into their favorite Pokémon. Some of the game sprites hardly resemble the design seen in the Pokémon animated series, which debuted in the late '90s.
Before fancy things like "cloud storage" or "flash memory", your Pokémon cartridges ran on an internal battery. These batteries have a several year lifespan, but eventually die, taking down the saved games with them. If you didn't go through the difficult process of backing them up, those game cartridges started running out of juice in 2012.
Now, Nintendo has a Pokémon Bank, giving users unlimited cloud storage of their Pokémon for a monthly fee. Game cartridges don't run on batteries anymore either, so in 200 years, anthropologists will still be able to see which evolution of Eevee you picked.
That's not to say the vibrant colors aren't welcome. But it's really nice to see how far the artwork has come.
Team Rocket were the original trouble makers, and they weren't really that good at it. But their failure was at least comical.
Several games later, and Team Flare is just as inept, with even less interesting motives. Still, they served for some great Pokémon battles.
The Pokémon battle system has always been complicated, but so many different elements have been added since the first games. Pokémon have passive abilities, they can hold items, they can Mega Evolve. There is so much more stuff for young Trainers to learn.
There has always been an art to catching Pokémon, which is rapidly smashing 'A' after your Pokéball closes until the point it stops shaking as the creature tries to escape.
Don't worry. That hasn't changed, which means you'll have all that twitchy thumb muscle memory to fall back on.
The catchphrase that spawned approximately a billion memes isn't going anywhere. How else would you know your Jolteon's electric shock worked so well against Golduck?
Image: Monsieur Gordon, Flickr.