A place for those who "Trust the Fungus"

I believe that every childhood has been captured in some way by the Pokémon franchise. Every person who plays Pokémon is probably reminded of at least one thing from their real life childhood. How was your childhood like Pokémon in real life?


Did you know that the Pokémon is the closest a video game has ever come to recreating the actual childhood of rural, American kids in the 1980s?

When I was a kid in Crawfordville, Florida, during the summer my brothers and I (as well as most of the kids in my town) would disappear out the door at sunrise and not come back until well after dark. We traveled the wilderness, forded rivers, built forts, made friends, and got into fights with rivals. My brothers and I captured frogs, snakes, lizards, turtles, grasshoppers, crickets, crabs, ants; we captured and raised possums, armadillos, raccoons, and more snakes. We owned dogs, cats, goats, chickens, ducks, and rabbits.

It didn't stop in my teenage years either; I climbed mountains where I lived, (in Bodfish, California) and explored abandoned, ghost towns as well as mines.

So, again, how was your childhood like Pokémon?

Have you read at all about the origins of the game series? It was very much inspired by growing up in rural Japan. Japanese kids spent a lot of time fishing, bug-catching and exploring caves. (That's why a lot of Japanese games feature caves/dungeons, including Miyamoto's own Legend of Zelda and Pikmin).

I've lived in apartments and suburbia all my life, but I still found time to explore the local parks, orchards and fields with my brothers. We raised a lot of havoc.

How was my childhood like Pokemon... um, well, a lot of it was spent in a confined space like a Pokeball, I guess, only instead of a Pokeball it was usually the principal's office.

Same here. I spent a lot of time explaining why I did something completely asocial, followed by sitting at a desk in the empty hallway outside of the principal's office. Good times.

I never really thought about people's lives being like living in a Pokéball; that is a very interesting, and apparently not quite unique, perspective. Thank you all for sharing.