Emulating My Past

I remember the first time I encountered a Pokémon game. No, it was not on a Game Boy that my parents gifted me nor in a schoolyard on a friend’s Game Boy. In fact, it was not on a Game Boy at all. The first Pokémon game I ever saw was on a computer, running on an emulator in the basement of the Islamic Center in Pennsylvania.

Video games did not exist in my life until my family and I moved from Indonesia to the United States in 2000. Then, we didn’t have enough money to buy game consoles, but we had family and friends who did. Every time we visited one of them, they’d boot up the PlayStation 1 or the Nintendo 64 and we’d play party games like Mario Kart. Back then, when I was a preteen, video games were just these brief moments that I got to experience in my friends’ houses. But as brief as each session was, it was enough to hook me.

When we moved back to Indonesia in 2004, it became even more impossible to access. The exchange rate between the Indonesian rupiah and the US dollar has been outrageous ever since the 1997 financial crisis. Buying a game console was equivalent to months of living costs. Buying a single game could mean skipping out on buying groceries for the month. Not to mention I was still a child at this point with only enough allowance to buy one comic book a month.

That’s when I remembered those afternoons spent at the Islamic Center. I couldn’t have a console, but my parents did buy us a computer for school work with  internet access (that we could only use on the weekends, but that’s another story.) This meant that, with enough research and know-how, I could emulate games on the computer like I did back then. I scoured the internet for ways to play video games without having to pay a single cent.

Piracy remains a hot-button topic to this day, but for many people like me — either broke or living in a country where purchasing games was next to impossible — it was the only way we could enjoy classics like Pokémon, Super Mario Bros., or Final Fantasy. I have fond memories of playing Harvest Moon on Visual Boy Advance and Suikoden on PSX. I played MegaMan Battle Network, Ace Attorney, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Medabots, Beyblade, Professor Layton, and so, so much more with the buttons of a keyboard instead of a gamepad.

Nowadays, I have a disposable income to not have to depend on emulation anymore. Thanks to platforms like Steam using a localized price system, it’s getting easier and easier to purchase video games. (The exchange rate still sucks, though.) Love it or hate it, the resurgence of remakes and remasters means I can legally revisit what I played illegally in my childhood. I’ve been marathoning the heck out of the Ace Attorney and MegaMan Battle Network series on my Nintendo Switch. I’ve bought most of the Pokémon games on Switch, one of the gaming franchises I sank so much time into.

When people ask me what my favorite retro system is, I always say the Game Boy Advance even though I’ve never held one in my hands. In truth, my favorite retro system is the Visual Boy Advance program on my computer. Every now and then, when I want the nostalgia to really hit, I’ll boot up the emulator and play a Pokémon game with my keyboard. Just like the old days.