Pokemon Gold and Silver: The Game Boy Learns to Tell Time
Pokemon Gold Edition (CiB) Pokemon Silver Edition (CiB)
By 1999 the Game Boy was ten years old and should have been finished. The Game Boy Color had arrived the year before, the rest of the industry was deep into discs and polygons, and the little grey machine from 1989 looked ready for retirement. Then Game Freak came back to it. Pokemon Gold and Silver were built as Game Boy games, enhanced for the new Color but still made to run on the original hardware, so the biggest Nintendo sequel of the year played perfectly well on a decade-old grey brick. Only the South Korean release was tied to the Game Boy Color; everywhere else, the 1989 machine could still handle the newest Pokemon. That is exactly why they belong in a collection built around the DMG-01.
A second world called Johto
The new games moved west, to a region called Johto, and added a hundred new creatures, bringing the total from 151 to 251. Players began again from scratch, choosing between Chikorita, Cyndaquil and Totodile, and set out to earn eight badges just as before. The real surprise came after the Johto league was beaten: the player could cross east into Kanto, the region of the original Red and Green, and take on its gyms all over again. Two full worlds sat on a single Game Boy cartridge, a staggering amount of game for the hardware.
A cartridge that kept time
The headline feature was time itself. Gold and Silver carried a real clock inside the cartridge, set at the start of the game, and the world followed it. Day turned to night and back again, and some creatures appeared only after dark, like the owl Hoothoot. The days of the week mattered too: on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays a Bug-Catching Contest ran in the National Park. All of it was managed through the Pokegear, a gadget handed to the player at the very start that combined a clock, a map, a radio and a telephone. For the first time a Game Boy adventure moved in step with the player's own day.
Systems with real depth
Beneath the new region sat a generation of quiet, lasting changes. Two new types, Dark and Steel, were added to rein in the previously dominant Psychic type. Pokemon could now be bred at a day care, where a matched pair produced an Egg that hatched into a baby creature. They could carry held items into battle, opening up far deeper strategy. A local craftsman named Kurt would turn foraged Apricorns into specialist Poke Balls, one a day. And hidden in the code was the shiny Pokemon, a rare alternate colouring so scarce that spotting one became a lasting badge of luck. A great deal of what the series still does began here.
Still a Game Boy game
For all that ambition, Gold and Silver were a long time coming. They had first been shown in 1997 and promised for early 1998, but the launch slipped, and Nintendo issued a rare public apology for the delay. When they finally arrived, in Japan in November 1999 and the West across 2000 and 2001, what shipped was still, at heart, a Game Boy game. On the original 1989 machine it renders in the familiar four shades of grey-green: two regions, a clock, a hundred new creatures and all, running on hardware older than many of the children playing it. Only the third version, Crystal, would break with the old machine and go Game Boy Color exclusive. Gold and Silver did not, and that is why they sit here among the DMG-01 cartridges, proof that the grey brick was still receiving landmark games a full decade after it launched.
You can find Pokemon Gold and Pokemon Silver in the Game Boy Museum collection. For the wider story, see Pokemon on the Game Boy. This piece is part of Pokemon and the Game Boy, the museum's guide to the whole Pokemon corner.
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