New Arrival: Pokemon Yellow, the Game With Pikachu at Your Heels
By 1998 the original Game Boy was nearly a decade old and should have been fading away. Instead, a small yellow mouse gave it one last, enormous surge of life. This arrival is the Japanese original of Pokemon Yellow, the game that put Pikachu at the player's heels and sold in the millions.
What It Is
Pokemon Yellow: Special Pikachu Edition was released in Japan in 1998 and elsewhere in 1999 and 2000. This Japanese version is the original release of what the West came to know as Pokemon Yellow, and in Japan alone it sold around 1.549 million copies in 1998, one of that year's biggest hits. Its defining feature was Pikachu following the player around the map and reacting with visible emotions, which gave the game unusual warmth and personality on the monochrome Game Boy. It was marketed alongside the Game Boy Pocket Printer, including a Special Pikachu Edition printer that could print pages of the Pokemon picture book, and it went on to sell 14.64 million copies worldwide. The collection also holds the Pikachu console and the Pikachu Pocket Printer.
The Anime, Made Playable
Pokemon Yellow was a special edition for a specific reason: it reshaped the original games to match the wildly popular animated series. Pikachu became your unavoidable starter, just as it is Ash's partner on television, and rather than sit in its ball it walked behind you, its on-screen face shifting between happiness and annoyance depending on how you treated it. That single touch, a creature with feelings trailing at your heels, gave a monochrome role-playing game a startling emotional pull, and it is a large part of why the edition is so fondly remembered.
The wider story is even bigger. Pokemon arrived late in the Game Boy's life, in 1996, and single-handedly revived a console the industry had all but written off, driving a second wave of sales that carried the handheld to the end of the decade. Pokemon Yellow was the peak of that revival on the original hardware, and its tie-ins, the Pikachu-yellow console and the Special Pikachu Edition printer that could print your Pokedex, both in the collection, show how completely one franchise took over the Game Boy in its final years. A 14-million-selling game arriving on a supposedly obsolete machine is one of the most remarkable second acts in gaming history.
Why It Joined the Collection
Few games did more for the original Game Boy's later years than Pokemon Yellow, and holding the Japanese original, the version where it all started, documents that revival at its source. It ties directly to the collection's Pikachu console and Pikachu Pocket Printer, forming a little Pikachu cluster that shows how thoroughly the franchise reshaped the Game Boy. Preserving it keeps hold of the game that gave the console a triumphant final chapter.
Pokemon Yellow is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.
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