I actually DID catch them all at some point. No, really.
I'm discussing, of course, Pokemon. While some of the more recent games have been less than charming, the originals were at the time a marvel. It defied all odds, becoming the very best selling game of all time, despite being on the Game Boy original and having a very small development team that worked on the game for roughly six years. Why did it do so well, when considering its humble beginning?
The Game Boy at the time really wasn't much. Other than Tetris, Pac-Man and a few gaggles of variable-quality NES ports, there wasn't a whole lot to play with. Then along comes this Nintendo-published RPG (of all things) that not only plays as good as a console game, but squeezed personality out of the largely unappealing Game Boy platform. It didn't just make another cheap piece of junk that many Game Boy games were; it actually tried to make a life for itself beyond that AA-battery-sucking whale of a device. It was a game that excelled in spite of its platform, creating a world that was, at its core, a fun place to play. No wonder it caught on so fast; it was one of the first handheld games to get it right, and make a great RPG that could be played at any time.
It was so easy to just pick up the thing and play for a few minutes and then put it away. While modern games have made this faster and easier (you don't even have to save in Fire Emblem, for example), the gameplay in Red/Blue actually rewarded this small-spurt approach. It wasn't something that anyone would want to play for many hours non-stop due to its repetitive nature, but it sure made those small game sessions rewarding and enjoyable. And because it actually let you save the game (something not quite tapped into at the time), it could offer twenty hours of fun and excitsement, easily. Keep in mind this was back in the day when we had 150 Pokemon to catch, instead of the unmanageable 500 monsters that baffles any sane mind.
With that few monsters, it felt more like link-cable battles were more feasible and interesting. Rather than just make a party filled with anything, it was better to try and find the best among what you had in this small platter of monsters. Who could forget the first time they took down a friend's Mewtwo? Those battles turned Pokemon, for a time, into the only real-life MMO in existence; I cannot remember another game that so many people owned and trained in. Some of my better memories from 1997 and 1998 were seeing random kids playing Pokemon in public and asking to battle, which most obliged to. And I also remember being really peeved, because I liked the color Blue better than Red, and therefore missed out on Arcanine, the strongest fire type in the game (aside form Moltres, but that bird has to be trained with TM's to get anywhere).
That kind of discussion you see above was fairly common in my circle of friends at the time. We all made a vow to never exploit the item-copy cheat, though most of us did anyway (I'm fairly certain none of us had the attention span to level to 100, and yet we did, somehow). We compared notes on how to get through the game effectively, syncing up our game resets every month or so for competition interests. We all watched the cartoon, ate the Pikachu pop-tarts and Poliwag cereal, played the trading card game, and battled the crap out of each other's virtual monsters until our batteries died. Heck, the week after my Whale Game Boy died (due to a mysterious battery explosion) it was the hardest wait of my life saving up for a new, fancy, just released Game Boy Color.
All of this experience and metagame is built around mostly a single player game. The world that Game Freak created was exciting and new, more interesting than anything we had ever seen with our Nintendo 64's. The Role Playing element was simple and yet effectively implemented, and it never pandered to just the little kids. For the grown-ups, it was a matter of enjoying the easy, comforting ride after beating Goldeneye. Even the teenagers, at the time, would ride the little kids' bus leveling up their monsters while singing along to OK Computer. That's 1997 for you.
The game was never the prettiest, or the best sounding. The game looked slightly better than the usual on the NES, and sounded mostly like a MIDI keyboard in the family blender. The monsters omitted sounds that roughly emulated the noises a dead cat would utter when the air is being expelled from its lungs. But in Pokemon's case, which was more profound than anything, was how little any of that mattered, even in the new 3D era of Quake and Super Mario 64. Nearly ten years later, in this world of the Unreal 3 Engine and orchestrated soundtracks, it's hard to believe that we ever enjoyed a game that wasn't about the audio/visual spectacle, even if it wasn't at least a small factor.
The game might not have had user friendliness, but it was more friendly than some of the other games at the time. Besides, forgetting a few SNES exceptions, RPG's hadn't really taken off outside of Japan until Final Fantasy VII strolled along that same year. Any of those games, though, were all pretty user-alienating, so for the mainstream video game player, this was a new kind of game. It was an RPG that emphasized customizing over brute force, which hadn't been tried much outside of the PC. Turns out people like choice, huh?
Each of the monsters, save a few worthless catches, were all worth grabbing and trying out. In the first few months it was more fun to catch the monsters and then give them a trial run in the area before than it was to actually progress through the game itself. The game itself wasn't as easy as the GBA iterations, either, with some genuine challenge to be found in the Elite Four and later battles, creating an analysing phase to figure out what would be best. This was the golden era of the series, honestly.
The only criticisms for the game really only stem forward to later games in the franchise, where the Pokemon formula began to grow old after repeated use. But for the first game alone, it wasn't even an issue, because we as a gamer nation could not get enough of it. After Nintendo obtained their obscene amounts of money from the series, Yellow came out (with color!) to some minor fanfare, and then Gold and Silver, arguably the very best sequel the company could have done. But that's another review altogether.
Was that a review? Perhaps. It's more of a meditation on some old memories, because there are no real criticisms for the games themselves. Red and Blue, without a doubt, changed the gaming industry in major ways, becoming an insane force that no one, not even non-gamers, can deny. And it deserved it, which is a rarity in this dirty industry. Not perfect, but sure amazing, Pokemon Red and Blue go down in history as one of the best games ever made.