do you think pokémon would be as much of a cultural mainstay as it is today if the 1st-gen games weren't so full of poor programming and strange glitches that they spawned volumes of urban legends and horror stories
@typhlosion yeah, I think at least initially the cultural outbreak was caused at least as much by the anime than the game, and even without glitches as severe as there are the very nature of the game would've still generated schoolyard legends
@typhlosion no. they literally picked up popularity after stuff like the mew glitch spread and magazines and stuff were covering it. people saw the trick to get a powerful otherwise inaccessible character and got interested in a thing that flew by them previously. I don't think we would get blue or any later releases without this popularity spike. and also of note is that the work on all sequels was going poorly and anything further ever released only because of the huge demand
@typhlosion yes, the marketing was insanely huge
@typhlosion for sure yeah
@typhlosion I don't think the urban legends were particularly based on anything real, just kids one-upping each other before the internet
iirc the ACE are other really cool glitches weren't widely known until at least after the 2nd gen?
I think the pokémon world hit a sweet spot in terms of being a fun world just to inhabit & that's what captured people's imagination
@lioness @typhlosion Missingno. was definitely known when it was current though, and that spawned a bunch of urban legends
-F
@typhlosion I think the difference that made was small enough to be negligible, especially over 25 years after the fact. A bigger factor was quite frankly that those games miraculously functioned *at all*.
@typhlosion i think so. bear in mind around the same time people made up stuff about Luigi being in Mario 64 and (insert character here) in super smash brothers.
The random nature of Pokemon encounters and all the little things to find in the game (legendaries etc) already fuel speculation
@typhlosion Yes