I thought i'd share a story of some really old Pokemon I found this weekend. These we're on a 17 year old floppy disk, dating back to 07/05/2000 by the looks of it.
Back then Pokemon Gold / Silver had only been released in Japan and would not be released in Europe until almost a year later, however i didn't know any of that back then. I remember one weekend my friend who's Granddad lived a few houses down the street came around to visit. He said someone at his school said he had a new Pokemon game called Gold and Silver which was only out in Japan and could play it on his PC with something called an Emulator. To us this seemed amazing as we had no idea more Pokemon games than Red and Blue even existed, keep in mind at this point Pokemon Yellow hadn't even been released in Europe yet.
Emulators and roms didn't really mean anything to either of us, however I did have limited access to the internet. For some context back then the internet was just becoming affordable, 1p a minute dial-up internet was something Freeserve started to offer here in the UK, which finally persuaded my parents to let us get the internet. I was however limited to 1 hour a week on the internet so we didn't get a really expensive phone bill.
As it happened I'd not used my internet allowance for the weekend yet, so I remember we connected to the internet and searched on Yahoo. We found a Geocities site which had the NO$GMB emulator and a vary basic translation of Pokemon Gold, i seem to remember this had the menu's, items and Pokemon names along with the story to around the 3rd gym translated to English. Needless to say we were amazed and slowly downloaded it.
What was even more cool at the time was the NO$GMB emulator could emulate the game twice, meaning we could both play using different keys on the keyboard and trade Pokemon with each other. I remember my friend took a copy on a floppy disk home with him so he could play on his PC too. We would then go to eachothers house with our save games on a floppy disk to play Pokemon together and trade.
With Windows 98 been as stable as it was back then the younger me was smart enough to backup my save games on floppy disks, as i'd already lost everything more than once due to multiple PC crashes. This floppy with all my save games is something i recently came across, despite not been touched for 17+ years going by the dates of the files on it I was able to copy everything off it.
On this disk was a zip with various saves from the NO$GMB emulator, including the save from the somewhat translated Pokemon Gold we used to play.
So I now have my very first:
Typhlosion at level 58
Feraligatr at level 56
Meganium at 54
I also appear to have in my party:
Togepi at level 5, i believe I had the egg in my party for almost the entire game for it to eventually hatch
Marill at level 15
Pidgey at level 5
The zip file with my emulator saves:
Save game data in PKHex:
It appears i'd played for 20 and a half hours back then and managed to get the first 10 gym badges.
With the recent announcement of Pokemon Gold and Silver for the 3DS VC I will certainly have to transfer my first GEN 2 Pokemon up to GEN 7! I'd totally forgotten about this until I found the old floppy.