Like most youngsters on the flip of the century, my two sisters and I had been obsessive about Pokémon. We had the GameBoy video games, the VHS tapes, binders bursting on the seams with buying and selling playing cards— you title it. And after we lastly acquired our first online game console in 2000 (after years of begging our mother), it was Pokémon-themed too: the Nintendo 64 Pikachu Edition.

Of course, that’s not what we known as it. We known as it our “Pikachu Nintendo.” It was amongst Nintendo’s first consoles themed round considered one of its IPs, and arguably probably the most elaborate at that. Given the Pokémania gripping the world on the time, the corporate may have slapped a Pokémon pores and skin on any previous Nintendo 64 and odds are the issues nonetheless would have flown off the cabinets. By 2000, simply two years after Pokémon’s debut exterior of Japan, the sequence had already made the cover of Time Magazine and earned a spot for its de facto mascot, Pikachu, within the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, which it’s held to today.

Instead, Nintendo redesigned the system to place the little electrical mouse entrance and heart. Pikachu’s cheeks, which retailer electrical energy in-game, flash shiny purple when the system activates. Hitting his foot resets the system. The energy button is within the form of a Poké ball, and the whole console, controller included, is blue and yellow to match the colours of the Pokémon emblem. Nintendo later launched a slew of handhelds and consoles themed to its completely different properties corresponding to Animal Crossing, The Legend of Zelda, and different sequence the place it caught to extra superficial alterations, altering the look of the console’s physique or the colour scheme for its buttons. However, none have baked a personality into the console’s design to the identical extent because the Nintendo 64 Pikachu Edition.

Nintendo going all out with this technique simply goes to indicate how fucking enormous Pokémon was on the time—and its affect has solely exploded within the a long time since. After debuting in 1996 with Pokémon Red and Green, its expansive catalogue of video games, buying and selling playing cards, TV reveals, and different merchandise has made Pokémon the highest-grossing leisure franchise in historical past with an estimated $100 billion in all-time sales. Its video games, that are developed by Game Freak and printed by Nintendo, have bought greater than 380 million units worldwide, and its menagerie of pocket monsters has grown from 151 to almost 900.

Though all that mattered to my sisters and I again then was that we lastly had a (freaking cute!) console to ourselves. No extra begging our cousins to provide us a activate theirs or wrestling with youngsters at daycare to squeeze in one other 5 minutes of playtime. We nonetheless needed to share it with one another after all, so we begrudgingly hashed out a number of core tenets to maintain the squabbling to a minimal. All the whereas understanding full properly that if we did not hammer out phrases that everybody may agree on, our mother, her persistence already stretched to its breaking level every day from being a single mum or dad with three kids, would make good on her promise to “take the damn thing right back to the store.” We adopted these self-imposed guidelines with the identical piety as commandments: thou shalt not save over another person’s recreation file; screenwatch beneath penalty of forfeit; and honor your negotiated flip lengths, although some leniency was allowed if the present participant nonetheless wanted to discover a save level (we weren’t fully heartless, in any case).

Naturally we weren’t good, however we managed to keep away from inflicting an excessive amount of of a headache and our valuable console stayed. It was one of many few issues beneath the Christmas tree that 12 months, appropriately bundled with a duplicate of Hey You, Pikachu!, probably the most infuriatingly damaged video games I’ve ever encountered.

To play, you “talked” to Pikachu via a microphone connected to the controller, telling him the place to go, find out how to work together with issues, what to electrocute (which got here up surprisingly usually). At least, that was the gross sales pitch. In actuality, Nintendo’s nascent voice recognition software program didn’t work anyplace close to persistently sufficient to construct a recreation mechanic round, which made getting Pikachu to do actually something a irritating crapshoot. Supposedly Pikachu was programmed to grasp greater than 200 words, but when true, in my expertise he ignored nearly all of them in favor of utilizing thundershock to burn each merchandise he picked as much as a crisp.

More than as soon as, I keep in mind rage quitting solely to have a look at the Pikachu on our console, that cutesy smile on his face now trying extra like a shit-eating grin taunting me, and being tempted to punch it proper within the face. Hey You, Pikachu! was additionally the one Nintendo 64 recreation we owned for the higher a part of a 12 months—a minimum of till our birthdays rolled round within the fall—as our mother was completely incredulous that she had simply spent tons of of {dollars} on a console and we needed her to fork over much more for video games to play on it. Suffice it to say, I spent a lot of time yelling at Pikachu (and about the identical period of time banished to my room for the language that will come out in these heated moments).

Of course, looking back, I keep in mind the console rather more fondly. It’s turn into considerably of a collector’s merchandise within the a long time since, going for tons of of {dollars} on eBay and different on-line auctions. But I don’t plan on eliminating our previous Pikachu Nintendo anytime quickly. It survived rising up with three lady avid gamers, and has the stickers to show it.