Twenty-five years, one indigo Game Boy Color, a soldering iron, and two kids who are just now meeting the legendary beasts for the first time.
Pokémon Crystal was released in North America on July 29, 2001. That makes it twenty-five years old this wee…and it’s still, without hesitation, my favorite game ever made.
I’ve been sitting with that number for a few days now, partly because I just replaced the battery in my original cartridge and played the whole thing through again, and partly because I spent the weekend introducing my kids to the world that started all of this for me. Twenty-five years is a long time for anything to stay in your life. This little game and the Game Boy it lives in somehow have.
Let me tell you how it all started.
It Started at Toys R Us
Sometime around 1999, I walked into Toys R Us with my dad and my report card. My dad had a tradition: if we kept our grades up — or even just showed some improvement — we got to pick out a gift. As I got older, he set a firm hundred-dollar cap, which I completely understood. But if you were a kid working with a hundred dollars in a Toys R Us, you know you had to strategize.
That day, I walked out with an indigo Game Boy Color. I still have it. It still works. And the very first game I bought to go with it was Pokémon Blue. I picked Squirtle as my starter — of course I did. It was blue.
Blue, Yellow, Silver… and Then Crystal
Blue was the beginning, but it was far from the end.
Then came Yellow, and walking around with Pikachu trailing behind me felt genuinely revolutionary. Yellow made you feel like you were in the show — like you were Ash.
Then Silver, and I remember that purchase too, because Silver introduced the day-and-night cycle. On the car ride home from Toys R Us, I actually had a hard time playing, because I’d forgotten my little book light and it was already dark outside. If you played Silver, you know exactly the problem I’m describing.
And then… Crystal.
Every one of those games was special in its own way. But Crystal was different. It’s the one that stuck.
Why Crystal Was Different
Crystal did a few things no Pokémon game had done before. It was the first where you could play as a girl. It was the first with animated Pokémon sprites — when you ran into a Pokémon, it actually moved, which Gold and Silver never did.
But for me, what set Crystal apart came down to a single Pokémon: Suicune.
I’ve always loved the water legendaries. It probably started with Articuno. But Suicune was on another level — and Crystal made Suicune the star of the whole story.
Here’s the lore, in case you never went looking for it. About 150 years before the events of the game, the Brass Tower in Ecruteak City was struck by lightning, and three Pokémon trapped inside died in the fire that followed. As the sun rose, Ho-Oh — the legendary phoenix — descended and brought them back, each one reborn as something new:
- Raikou, the lightning that struck the tower: an Electric-type that races across the land on storm clouds.
- Entei, the flames that burned: a Fire-type whose roar is said to trigger volcanic eruptions.
- Suicune, the rain that put the fire out: the embodiment of the north wind, able to walk across water and purify anything it touches — and, of the three, the one said to be closest to Ho-Oh.
That’s why Crystal matters to me. The entire game quietly orbits around Suicune. You don’t just stumble into it — the whole story builds toward that encounter. Chasing Raikou, Entei, and Suicune around the map again this month was every bit the rush it was when I was a kid.
Family Movie Night
Here’s the part I didn’t see coming twenty-five years ago.
Over the weekend, my kids and I finished watching the entire original Pokémon series — Indigo League all the way through Master Quest. Five seasons. I’d seen all of it before, but watching it with them was a completely different experience.
Then we had a movie night and put on Pokémon 2000 — the one with Lugia. It doesn’t have Suicune in it, but it does have Articuno, and watching my kids react to that scene — the three legendary birds, the collector, Lugia rising out of the sea — I’ll be honest, I got a little emotional. Next on our list is Pokémon 3: Spell of the Unown, which is the Entei movie.
This is what Crystal started for me all those years ago: the legendary beasts, the lore, the whole world. And now I get to hand it to my kids.
Bringing a Dead Cartridge Back to Life
With all that nostalgia swirling around, I decided I was going to do a full playthrough of Crystal on original hardware — every gym, and Suicune caught the way I caught it the first time.
There was just one problem. I’d play, save, turn it off… and when I came back, the save was gone.
If you owned one of these old Game Boy cartridges — Crystal, Gold, Silver — you might know why. They rely on a tiny internal battery to keep the save file alive, and after about 15 to 20 years, that battery dies. When it goes, so does your progress. Permanently.
So I did something I’d never done before: I opened up my childhood copy of Pokémon Crystal. I don’t know how to use a soldering iron — but my dad is an electrical engineer, so he brought his whole kit, and this time he did the operating while I watched and waited. I was genuinely nervous. This is my original cartridge. If we ruined it, there was no replacing it.
Then I reassembled it, slid it into the Game Boy, played a few minutes, turned it off, powered it back on… and there it was. “CONTINUE”.
The same dad who walked me into Toys R Us in 1999 is the reason that save file lives on in 2026. I didn’t plan that symmetry, but I’ll take it.
251 Pokémon and the Missing Middle of America
A quick confession: my Pokémon knowledge stops cold at number 251 — the end of Gen 2. Everything after that is a blank. I could not name you a single Pokémon from Scarlet and Violet if my life depended on it, and I learned this week that there are now over a thousand of them.
My wife caught on to this. She said, “You’ve got all this Pokémon knowledge taking up space in your brain — let’s see what else is in there.” Then she made me write down all fifty U.S. states.
I got 42. Which, for the record, I still think is a solid B.
But I left off the entire middle of the country — Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa — just a big hole punched right through the center of America. My wife was not impressed. So apparently the 251 Pokémon are living rent-free in the exact spot where Nebraska should be. And honestly? I’m at peace with that trade. Sorry, Nebraska.
What Survived the Move
The last Pokémon game I ever bought was Sapphire for the Game Boy Advance. It was good — I remember Latias and Latios, and Kyogre, that enormous blue whale — but it never stuck with me the way Crystal did.
At some point my parents moved, and a few boxes went missing. Somehow all of it — Blue, Yellow, Silver, Sapphire, and the Game Boy Advance itself — just vanished. Donation center, landfill, some cousin’s basement; I genuinely don’t know.
What survived? This indigo Game Boy Color. And this copy of Pokémon Crystal.
They only survived the move because I took them to college with me. They’ve been in my dorm rooms, my apartments, and now my first house. In twenty-five years, they’ve never left my side. I couldn’t have known which games would make it and which wouldn’t — but somehow the one that mattered most, the one with Suicune on the cover, is the one that stayed.
25 Years Later
Twenty-five years ago I walked into a Toys R Us with my report card and my dad. This month I got to fix that same cartridge with my own hands, play through it start to finish, and show my kids the legendary beasts on an indigo Game Boy Color — exactly the way it was meant to be played.
If your own old Pokémon cartridges have gone dark, replacing the battery is absolutely worth the effort — just know you’re doing it at your own risk (or, ideally, with an electrical engineer on standby).
So tell me: if you played Crystal back in the day, who was your starter? Mine was Chikorita. And more importantly — which legendary beast was your favorite? I’m a Suicune guy, obviously, with Entei a close second. But I’ve got nothing but respect for the Raikou fans out there.
