Hey You, Pikachu

As a kid, I had a relationship with console games characterized primarily by restriction and longing. I was not allowed to own console or handheld systems, and I could only play those games when friends offered them to me. But in elementary school specifically, most of my closest friends didn't have consoles or handhelds either. So I was borrowing GameBoys from lesser acquaintances - usually, on the bus to a field trip. I could usually get someone to let me play their copy of Pokemon by offering to grind out battles for them.

Pokemon was the main thing I wanted to play. I was a massive fan of the IP, and my behavior got pretty bizarre in the face of this denial. I actually bought the Prima strategy guide for Gold and Silver and just read it cover to cover a zillion times. I would get a stack of graph paper and diagram out which Pokemon teams I would use in the various levels of this game I didn't have and wasn't allowed to play. My parents knew I was doing this. I have no idea what they thought about it.

At one point my parents got me a subscription to a Pokemon fan magazine. I suspect that this was where I learned about Hey You, Pikachu.

Here's a Hey You, Pikachu GDQ speedrun from this past summer:

Today, this game really does seem pretty dogshit! It's clear that the voice recognition technology is not very good, and that the gameplay itself is pretty shallow and uninteresting.

As a kid, though, I remember reading about this game and feeling an insane mix of emotions. I was awed, baffled, angry, and immensely credulous. I felt like the world was rushing by outside my door, heading places I couldn't go, toward crazy technological experiences I wasn't allowed to have. I assumed that if there was a Pokemon game about talking to and taking care of a Pikachu, you really would be doing those things.

It didn't occur to me once that someone could sell a Nintendo 64 game that basically doesn't work and consists mainly of low-interactivity "autoscroller" segments.

Anyway, watching this GDQ run was fascinating for me. I hadn't thought about Hey You, Pikachu in years, but I discovered it still occupied some unexamined spot in the "mindblowing technological wonder superapp I'm not allowed to have" corner of my mind. Seeing people make fun of it (and finish it in under an hour!) was a trip.

I haven't often had this experience of discovering that something I wanted in my childhood was dogshit this whole time. It's left me thinking about kids today... there's a ton of scam technology today, probably even more scam technology than when I was a kid. Are there young kids out there longing after terrible AI products they can't have? Stuff they've been lied to about? I sometimes find myself wondering what kids think of all this stuff and feeling an immense yawning dread in my gut. It feels like the air we breathe here in the US right now is just absolutely thick with lies and scams, particularly around tech. When I was a kid, people were just... exaggerating the effectiveness of the N64 microphone dongle. Today they're straight up lying about what the tech does, on a societal scale.

Anyway!! I recommend looking up something you wanted as a kid and checking to see how fake and terrible it really was this entire time. Free yourself from the desires of the past, or whatever. It might be interesting!!