Pokémon Red and Blue came out in 1996 on the Game Boy and started a cultural phenomenon. Not only in the gaming world, but when the show came out that exploded as well. The Game Boy was a popular system, but those two games really gave people a reason to own one. In 1998 Pokémon Yellow Version came out, and the Game Boy Color was a month later. If you went to a school in 1998, chances are you would see every other kid playing one during the course of the day.
Looking back on those games though, people were wrong about so many things. Not just in gameplay, but in the lore and secrets. Most of the stuff your friends told you about ended up being bull or they did it because they cheated, like having endless Master Balls or Rare Candy. That Rare Candy cheat was handy to get every Pokémon to level 100 and completely destroy the Elite Four, though. There were only two truly secret Pokémon between Red, Blue, and Yellow. We will get to some those with the list below. If you played those games at the time, then you know who they are. Getting them, on the other hand, was interesting.
Below is a list of 20 things that everyone gets wrong about Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow. The internet wasn’t as big back in 1996-98, so you had to rely on your friends or Nintendo Power. Let’s get to it!
20 You’re Gonna Break Your Game Boy
A very common thing that somehow made the rounds involved holding the B button while you were trying to catch a Pokémon. Now, this had a few different variants, and all of them are totally fake. One way was to tap B slowly once the Poké Ball was thrown and the ball wiggled. Like hitting the button every time the ball moved, it totally didn’t work, though. Another was simply holding down B once the ball was thrown. Looking intensely at the screen added to it, but wasn’t necessarily part of the myth. The main one though was holding down B while holding the down direction on the d-pad. This was supposed to be the be-all-end-all of Pokémon catching. If you did it at the exact correct time, then it was a guaranteed catch! Well, guess what? It didn’t work either. It’s all based on what ball you use, and that’s about it. It’s literally a random percentage.
19 Color Thief
So the Game Boy Color came out in 1998 during the Pokémon craze! It played a good bit of Game Boy games in color, kind of sprinkling color here and there for some games. You have to remember, the Game Boy had the green screen and games weren’t in color. Pokémon Red and Blue did not have any color added to them. Pokémon Yellow was already out when it came out, and that was the first Pokémon game in color. That’s a big reason that version became so popular.
When people talk about the early Pokémon games and how colorful they were… well, not really. The 20th anniversary of Pokémon was last year, so it’s easy to forget things like the original Game Boy not having color or even a back light. You had to make sure you were in a well-lit room to catch some Pokémon. The Game Boy Pocket was also popular since it was smaller, but still no color.
18 Who Are Mew?
Everyone knows that there were 150 Pokémon in the original games and that Mew was the mysterious 151st Pokémon. Most people think Mew was an end-game kind of thing for players to find as a hidden nugget to find once you had done everything else. Well, Mew wasn’t supposed to be in the game. Mew was added last minute by a programmer as a bit of a joke since there was just enough room on the cartridge to add one more Pokémon.
Mew wasn’t this highly talked about until the game had been out for a while, and even then it was just a rumor. Getting Mew wasn’t as simple as getting Mewtwo. Mewtwo was just at the end of the Unknown Dungeon, and you just threw a Master Ball at him and there you go. You couldn’t actually capture Mew either, just go up against him. Once Mew was discovered, it set the world on fire!
17 No Limit, Soldiers
Let’s just get this out of the way immediately: there’s only one Master Ball in Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow. Not like one between the games, there’s one in each game. You remember your friend coming up to you and they had 50 Master Balls and they told you some garbage about finding them in different spots? Well, that’s not a thing. You get one towards the end of the game and that’s it. Now, there was a cheat to get as many copies of an item as you wanted, and that included the Master Ball. Not going to lie, using that cheat and catching any high level Pokémon is super fun, but it does make the end-game tedious. So, if your friend Mike comes up to you and tells you he got his 700 Master Balls just exploring the world, then you can call him out on his crap… I know it’s 2017 now, but still.
16 Aren’t You Supposed To Be The Comic Relief?
In-between Red and Blue releasing in 1996 and Yellow Version releasing in 1998, Pokémon started a TV series. Game Freak (developer) was actually against a show being made that soon after the initial games came out, but oh how they were wrong about that. The show blew up and became mandatory viewing for anyone into the game. Yellow Version actually had Pikachu as your starter because of the show! Now, there are differences between the game and the show, obviously. People thinking that gym leaders like Misty and Brock were the same were totally wrong. Brock was kind of goofy on the show and he was not in the game. Team Rocket and Meowth were extremely goofy on the show and not as much in the game. So basically, some of the characters in the show that brought comic relief didn’t do that in-game. They had to give them personality though, so that makes sense.
15 They’re Here, Calm Down
Whenever you hear someone talking about how they think Pokémon Yellow is better than Red and Blue but they wish they could play as the original starters in the game, well, you can. All the starters are in the game and you don’t even have to catch them! How about that! Does that sound good… I’ll bet it does… okay, it got weird. You can find the starter Pokémon in the original versions but it’s much harder than them just being them handed to you like in Yellow. Charmander is given to you by a poor trainer in Cerulean City, Bulbasaur is with the nurses in Cerulean City, and Squirtle is given to you by Officer Jenny after you beat Lt. Surge at the Vermilion City Gym. Easy!
Even if you didn’t know that you could get the original starters, you would more than likely just run into getting one just by playing. Pokémon X and Y took a similar formula by basically giving you two starters.
14 You’re Walking, Bro
Hey do you have a $1,000,000 that I can like, just have? Why do I need it? Well there’s this really sweet bike that I need so I don’t have to run around Kanto on foot. You don’t? Okay, well that’s cool. I think I can get one for free somehow, so I’ll probably just do that. Why didn’t I just go do that from the start? I mean, it never hurts to ask. It’s not like that’s a ton of money. Oh, it is a lot of money? It’s like a stupid amount for just a bike?
For real though, you can’t buy the bike in the early Pokémon games. The most money you can hold is $999,999 on purpose. You have to get the Bike Voucher from the Pokémon Fan Club Chairman in Vermilion City. Take that back to the shop and you instantly save a cool million.
13 Empty Promises
After Red and Blue had been out a while, the rumor mill started turning about some of the secrets. One of the biggest myths was Bill’s garden having a ton of legendary Pokémon in it. Bill’s house is just North of Cerulean City and his garden is directly behind his house. The main reason that this got started was because there is an odd gap between the road and the garden and people ran with it. So you literally had people looking around for days trying to find Pokémon in that damn garden. The reason that gap is there is because it kept the mountain textures from mixing with the garden texturen ‘cause you have to remember these were Game Boy games and only had so much memory. You can get to the garden by using Surf near the body of water near his house and you can walk around in the small gap known as his garden; there’s nothing there though.
12 It’s Just A Truck
There is a truck near the S.S. Anne in Vermilion City that um… has Mew under it. Just go to it and boom, Mew’s all in your face! Sorry, that’s totally not a thing. That was the rumor for a while. You supposedly went up to it and moved it with strength, and Mew would be under it and you could catch him. Another rumor was that there was a secret Team Rocket base under there and Mew was at the end of the base. Literally none of these things are real. You can go to the truck but there’s nothing there in any of the early versions. There is a lava cookie there in FireRed and LeafGreen though, as an homage to hours of people trying to push that truck. Here’s hoping for another easter egg whenever this Pokémon game comes out for the Switch!
11 The Hills Are Alive… Or Dead
You know in the movie The Ring when someone watches the tape they get a phone call and they die a few days later? Well, imagine if a video game did that with its music. The rumor around the music in Lavender Town was similar to that. It was said that the music had harmful frequencies in it and drove not only people, but children especially to end it all. When Red and Green (Blue was the American version) came out in Japan, the number of child deaths went up and some were blaming the music in these games for it. A reason for this is what was going on in the town in-game. The story revolves around a Pokémon’s spirt haunting the town and a lot of the people in town talk about their Pokémon not being alive anymore. It’s depressing and deep for a kids’ game.
10 Splish Splash I Was… Doing Nothing
One of the more sought after Pokémon in the early games is Magikarp. And no, not because of his awesome move Splash, but because he evolves into the monster known as Gyarados. Gyarados is one of the strongest Pokémon in Red, Blue, and Yellow. Now, back to Magikarp for a second. His move splash had a rumor making the rounds in 1996. It was said that if you just kept using the move Splash, the only move the Pokémon can do, that eventually it would be a one-hit-kill on any Pokémon. Talk about getting something wrong… this was way wrong! The move does nothing, just like it says in-game when you do the move. He just splashes around like an idiot and wastes a turn. There had to have been so many Magikarp deaths trying this theory out, because there wasn’t a way to share experience in the early games so you had to swap them out mid-battle. R.I.P. Splash.
9 The First Town In The Game?
When first starting up Pokémon Red, Blue, or Yellow, the first town you will be in is called Pallet Town. It’s the character’s hometown and you start the game in your house. You have to go next door to receive your first Pokémon. There’s a section of grass that you have to walk though to leave the town, and there were rumors that if you spent enough time there that you could catch all the starter Pokémon. That is absolutely not a thing. You can level up your starter a bit if you want and go back to your house to heal up, and that’s about it. Even coming back later doesn’t matter, the same Pokémon are there. People genuinely thought spending hours there would result in running across a Bulbasaur. You see how a lot of these things revolve around starter Pokémon and Mew? People were crazy back in 1996… well, people still kind of are, so never mind.
8 “Gotta Love Crab”
This one is actually more of a believable thing than some of the others we’ve covered. People thought for a while that there was a place called Charizard Island in Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow. It makes sense since Charizard was the cover Pokémon for Red and became Ash’s closet Pokémon outside of Pikachu in the show. Charizard could fly in those games, and people thought that once you had fly and taught it to him that he would fly you there… yeah, didn’t happen. The only places you could fly in the original Pokémon games were the major cities and the Elite Four Pokémon Center. The later games opened that up, but there still isn’t a Charizard Island. It would be cool to see something like that in the Switch version and to see multiple ones flying around Skyrim style, and see huge monuments built for them. I’m wishfully thinking, I know.
7 That’s Not Yoshi… Is It? No, It’s Not
April Fools jokes are fun, right? Netflix is making a Zelda show, Dratini can evolve into Yoshi, I threw your Nintendo Switch in the garbage so you can’t play Xenoblade Chronicles 2! Wait… what was that second one again?
There was a magazine, The Expert Gamer, that posted an article in their April issue in 1999 that gave a way to make Dratini evolve into Yoshi, and people lost it! It makes sense since both franchises are Nintendo, and a dragon Pokémon evolving into another dragon-like character doesn’t seem that far-fetched. They even had a picture that looked legit. Well, it was just an April Fools’ joke, but the rumor stuck around and that did not stop people from trying to do it. You had to have two versions of Red with the story complete, and one version of Blue. The Blue player got Dratini from a Red player and evolved him to Dragonite. You then give it back to a Red player and then take it to where Mewtwo was and use a Fire Stone. Yeah, didn’t work.
6 Blueman… Pika
What if Pikachu was blue? Well, there were rumors about that being a thing after Red and Blue came out. There are Pokémon that are basically the same until they evolve in different directions, like Eevee basically having three different forms based on what stone you give it. Well, the Pikablu rumor was started because of Marill. Marill kind of has a Pikachu look but not quite, and that’s why people thought it was another evolution. Raichu is an evolved version of Pikachu that happens when you give it a Thunder Stone. It was said that if you beat the Elite Four 50 times they gave you a Pikablu, but that was very false. Another theory was that if you gave Pikachu a Water Stone, then that evolved it into Pikablu, but guess what… false too. Marill made its debut in Pokémon Gold and Silver and all the rumors died after that.
5 No Game Boy? No Problem!
If you’re a 3DS owner and a Pokémon fan, then this doesn’t really apply to you. This is more for the people that think you have to get a Game Boy/Game Boy Color or run an emulation on PC to play the original Pokémon games. Nintendo actually put Red, Blue, and Yellow out on the 3DS E-Shop. They cost $10 a piece and they are totally the original games without any changes to them. So if you’re feeling nostalgic or you have never played the original games, then you have a way of doing it on the cheap. Because if you want to get an original copy of the original Pokémon games, you’re going to spend a good bit more than $10, and you’ll have to play on a Game Boy and those probably don’t look as great as you remember. Technically the Game Boy Advance and SP played Game Boy games, and the DS Lite, so you could go those routes as well.
4 You Got That Green?
So most people know that Pokémon Red and Blue were the first games to come out, but were they really? It’s a rhetorical question, no they weren’t! At least they weren’t the first ones to come out in Japan. Red and Green were the first official Pokémon games to ever come out. They later did get the Blue Version, and that version was used to localize the game for the American releases. There really isn’t much of a difference in the versions other than some Pokémon not being in one version and the sprites looking better in Red and Blue. Pokémon Green Version to this day still remains a Japan-exclusive game. They did release LeafGreen on the Game Boy Advance though, and that was a remake of Green. That, along with FireRed, were released worldwide. Game Freak knew they hit it big with the original games and made sure to release all versions worldwide after that.
3 Okay Stop, You’ve Got It!
The main way that most of us captured Pokémon in the games was to lower its health as low as possible and use the highest ball to try and catch it. Well, turns out that none of that really mattered. Depending on what ball you use is the only real percentage that matters when catching a Pokémon in Red, Blue, and Yellow. Lowering its health and putting a status effect on it can help, but not as much as you think. Let’s say you want to catch a rare Pokémon like Mewtwo or Zaptos. You lower its health to 1/3 and put it to sleep and throw an ultra ball at it. You have about a 17% chance of catching it. If you just throw an ultra ball from the start without doing any of that, you have about a 19% chance. So next time you want to catch a rare Pokémon just throw a ball from the start.
2 You Get Down With Trades?
As annoying as trading could be, that was the only way to get certain Pokémon to evolve. If you wanted a Machamp or Gengar then you had to trade that Machoke and Haunter. To top it all off, you had to buy a link cable to connect the Game Boys together. Those handhelds didn’t have wireless connection capabilities in them back in 1996. People that thought that they would just get the Pokémon to max level and get one that way were a tad off! Now, it was possible to find the fully evolved versions in the wild, but that was all late-game stuff and they were hard to come by. They would normally run away after or outright kill you if you weren’t a high enough level. Some members of the Elite Four had fully evolved versions of some of the Pokémon, and although you couldn’t catch them, you could see them. So that’s something huh?
1 “You Will Know What It’s Like To Lose”
So one of the biggest things to come out of the first generation of Pokémon games was Missingno. Missingno isn’t so much a Pokémon as it is a glitch in the game. You can get it pretty easy as long as you have Surf and Fly. You talk to the grumpy guy in Viridian City and Fly to Cinnabar Island, and you use Surf to go up and down the coastline. You’ll run into a lot of high-level Pokémon there and you’ll eventually come across Missingno. You can catch him, but he’s not very useful in battle. Missingno looks like a jumbled up L because he basically is. A common mistake people make is thinking that catching him will erase your saved game. This is totally not true. Catching him will cause the game to crash from time to time but not erase your save file. Pokémon games only have one save file, so that’s why it became such a strong rumor.
