So I absolutely loved Pokemon when I was younger, felt like the exact perfect age for it. Born in '86. Blue for life yo!

Tried playing again fairly recently and can only play if I use an emulator on super speed (much like Final Fantasy which I also used to love).

Great. I just realized that I need to vote on my own poll to see the results. Add that to the list of factors that may skew the poll.

92' baby. It was the anime before the games that got me interested in Pokemon; I remember watching it when the first season was still new to the west. And also the TGC as well. The last thing I got into was the games around 2000-2002 before the first GBA games came out. The first game I played was Blue on my sister's friend's GBA, but I didn't get my own until 2004 when I got a GBA SP and a copy of Pokemon FireRed as a birthday gift.

And that was also one of the first games I ever owned. I had of course played some games previously, but never owned any until I was about 12 in '04.

89 and I was obsessed. Not any more but I still always play the RPGs. No longer interested in the wider pokemon range of media because they're aimed more at children. Except the cards, I guess.

20% for before 1981? Daaamn, didn't knew there were so many old people playing video games.

I'm in the 81 or Before crowd. My interest level in Pokemon has gained over the years to where now I look forward to new releases with some kind of strong anticipation. The first person that I knew who was interested in Pokemon was my brother, who is 13 years younger than I am. The last Pokemon game that I tried was Pokémon X/Y (Y for me) and I really enjoyed it. I think if I liked all things Pokemon then Pokkén Tournament would appeal to me more than it does, but I prefer the RPG and collecting side to the games.

89

Played the originals through gen 2. Stopped. Played gen 4. Stopped. Resurgence this year and going to play one game from every gen, taking a break after gen 4, those games suck...

@alistercat: I'm in the exact same boat, birth year and all.

Love me some Pokemon and I was born in '86. Though I did fall off for awhile around Gen 3 I've mostly played every main game at launch. Can't wait for Sun and Moon.

86-95 with significant drop off before and after. So most of these voters would've been between 3 and 12 years old when blue/red came out in the states. Seems about right? I'm from 93 and loved yellow, but that's also the only one I played.

93 here. The biggest thing I remember from elementary school is pokemon. Kids had the cards, we're playing pokemon at recess, talking about schoolyard made up cheats, the movies, the show, all of that. There was a huge drop off in middle school though. Everyone that was into that stuff moved onto yu-gi-oh. It wasnt until late high school that I started giving the handheld games a shot again and found out they were still pretty fun.

90. Loved every game all the way up until they went to the DS which I never got (eventually found a, uh, way, to experience all of those on a computer). Picked back up with the 3DS, X and Y games, and then actually bought Platinum and White/2 since the 3DS could play those as well.

Still heavily enjoy them. Grabbed Yellow on Virtual Console for 3DS, and while I still love it (still need to beat the E4 but I don't feel like trudging through Victory Road right now), holy shit did the games improve over time.

'87 I can still remember how crazy people went over collecting pokemon cards. On a trip to the US I made sure to buy a load that weren't out in the UK yet to show my friends when I got home.

I still have an interest in pokemon, but at an arms length. I don't play the games but I kind of like knowing what's coming out, seeing the starters that kind of thing. If I had a 3ds I'd definitely buy the games.

92. Played all the main games except B&W2.

88. Made my dad import Red before it was out in the UK cos I saw a half page preview near the back of a copy of... Gamesmaster? Might have been C&VG. Anyway there was a pic of Squirtles pokedex entry and for some reason I wanted it instantly.

He also brought home a GBC and a copy of Silver when visited San Francisco before it was out over here. Needless to say I was the shit in late primary-early high school.

'85

I got Red from a friend after his parents were convinced by their church that it was demonic.

'93 and I STILL have all of my cards XD

Well, mostly. I lost 575 of them at a car boot sale when Mum sold them for 20p when I turned my back for 2 seconds... Not amused.

They weren't even up for sale.

*Attempts to keep calm*

'87

I honestly don't remember exactly how I got into it. I can't remember if I saw the show or game first. I do remember seeing the first episode of the show because I was up super early in the morning or something? And I don't think I saw the whole episode but I thiiiiink maybe I teared up? I originally had the Blue version, which I think I still have and complete in box? For some reason, at some point as a kid, I thought it'd be cool to put the boxes and some of those Pokemon comic books that came with something, I can't remember, and put them in a zip lock bag. I found this bag a decade or two later and put the stuff back together and on my shelf.

So I still think Pokemon are pretty awesome even though I don't play many of the games these days. I am not one of those "Only the original 150 are cool and the rest are lame" people.. think that's a dumb attitude to have. I think the show is still decent (on the rare occasion I am playing one of the newer games, I will try and watch the show to help quench my thirst for more Pokemon stuff alongside the game.) The thing that the show got right was that it generally mirrored the game's story/areas/characters. So it was awesome seeing the little in-game sprites come to life on the screen with animation, sound, and the attacks and stuff. It allowed me to picture that in my head when I was playing with the simple game graphics. Or vice versa, Id love watching the show hoping/waiting for a certain Pokemon I really like/recently caught would get a cameo in the show or something.

All video game shows/movies need to take note of this stuff. Make the show/movie very loyal to the game and it should be awesome.

Also got into the cards when they started coming out. Still have my complete original set and then some.

I own Blue/Red/Yellow/Silver/Gold/Crystal/Black 2/X. I think I've played roms of Emerald, Pearl or Diamond, and White 1. My interest really fell off around Crystal. I started to see their cycle of the same game/structure with minor improvements and other video games were just exponentially improving around it and you're imagination runs wild think of what they could do if they wanted.. and then you just get mad that they never do.

Honestly though, Nintendo needs to do one of two things to really get me lusting for a new Pokemon game:

• Make a massive, open-world, third-person, single-player Pokemon RPG for a console.
• Make a massive, open-world, isometric or third person Pokemon MMORPG for a console.

They are smart/stupid to not have done this yet. It is just another one of the get-out-of-bankruptcy-free cards they could use if Nintendo ever needed to.

1993. I have an older brother who had Red on the game boy which is what initially hooked me, then became OBSESSED with the anime, then the trading cards. I can remember my six year old self jumping on the bed wildly to the theme song of my blockbuster copies of the show. Unfortunately all my old Pokemon stuff is basically gone, besides my original copy of Crystal still sitting in my Game Boy Color.

I was born in 89'. My first game was Pokemon Yellow, I got it alongside a teal Gameboy Color for my birthday.

I've had a running theory for a few years that kinds don't really play Nintendo games anymore. They're all off playing Minecraft or something now, and the remaining Nintendo fans (even for "kid" games like Pokemon) are predominantly people who were kids when Nintendo was hot stuff (mid 80s to mid 90s). In other words, Nintendo's current fanbase is mostly a bunch of 25-35 year-olds. The results for this poll give some credence to that theory, at least for Giant Bomb users and Pokemon.

More pertinent to this particular thread, I was born in 86, and my age group was pretty split on Pokemon. You either liked it or thought it was a dumb kiddie game. The people younger than me in school were all completely nuts for Pokemon. This result confirms my life experience.

Born '92, watched show a lot before the game, first game was Gold, last game was Sapphire, no interest afterwards. The pokemon got weird after that gen, in my opinion.

I was born in 96 and Pokémon was a huge part of my childhood. Played a lot of the games, watched a ton of the anime(I can still sing the amazing theme song), had a lots of Pokémon toys and collected a ton of the cards. You could say I was pretty into it during my youth.

However, around sixth grade(2007) kids my age started to think Pokémon was lame and you were a nerd if you liked it. So I stopped because I didn't want to be labeled a nerd. Since then I've occasionally tried to play the games, but I don't really enjoy the gameplay anymore so I always quit after a couple of hours. It doesn't help that a lot of the newer Pokémon designs look so stupid. No Pokémon will ever be as cute as Charmander, or as cool as Charizard.

I was in 6th grade when red/blue came out and I feel like I was on the cusp of the acceptable age for it to be cool to play Pokemon.

1986.

@imsh_pl said:

the average age of a gamer is 35 according to the ESA, which means quite a few ppl older than that play. http://essentialfacts.theesa.com/Essential-Facts-2016.pdf

The NPD said it was 38 in 2014

Whatever it is, the tail end of Gen X were the original console gamers so I'm not surprised many stuck with it.

In fact I'd say that's the biggest threat to AAA console games in the future is I don't think today's kids are gravitating towards it anywhere nearly as strongly as even ten years ago, they seem to strongly prefer mobile/touch stuff.

@majormitch:

I got buddies who are school teachers, they tell me it's mobile games anymore. Clash of Clans etc. things like the 3DS are an increasingly rare sight at those places anymore.

@majormitch: My little brother and most of his friends are pretty deep into Pokemon. Far more than i have been in years. (I'll still play them here and there, but not nearly as obsessively as I once did.)

94 here. I was but 2 years old when Pokemon came out in Japan and 4 when it came to the states. I got a copy of Pokemon Blue and a Gameboy in 99 and never looked back. I even saw the first movie when that came out in theaters. My aunt and cousin surprised me by telling me we were going to see The Phantom Menace, and took me to see that instead. Looking back I got a hell of break there. Lol

I'm nowhere near as obsessive with it as I was when I was younger, but I make sure to play through each game everytime it comes out. I would really describe the experience as cathartic. It take me back to being a kid and that's something I'll always treasure.

'88. I feel like I was the PERFECT age for pokemon. Still have all the cards in a binder somewhere.

'94 here. Pokemon was huge at elementary school (Silver/Gold era), but it got banned after a couple kids set up a Pokemon card black market during recess. Then we moved onto Beyblades. We got those banned too.

Thanks, Duders. Good stuff here.

That's what I'm getting from this. 1986-1995.

It's interesting; I wasn't expecting to see a drop-off. I took a lot of statistics when I was doing my undergrad, enough to know that methodology could have lead to such a result. The Giant Bomb fanbase tends to skew older, does it not? It may not be so much that younger kids aren't playing as much Nintendo, as it is that (most) younger gamers gravitate towards gaming on YouTube, IGN, etc. Or it could be a mix of both. This isn't a very rigorous poll, after all.

I'm abstaining from voting. Pokemon came out when I was about 10 or so, and I was a big fan of the games and TV show at the time, but as much as I liked Red/Blue quite a bit, my interest dropped pretty dramatically and by the end of Silver I was pretty much done with the series. So yeah, not a long-term fan of the series, and I don't just want to turn the poll into "here's some age data on Giant Bomb forum users regardless of whether they actually like Pokemon or not", so I won't involve myself in the poll. B just sayin', I'm still baffled that people can play more than one of these games. It's fun for what it is, but boy does that series not change very much, and the battle system is pretty simplistic.

To be fair this poll has some bias from being on giantbomb. The userbase here leans older so it's not surprising we're mostly seeing people between 86-94. The idea is reasonable, but I will say that I don't think mobile games and minecraft are mutually exclusive from Nintendo games. Kids have enough time to be into both. My nephews play a ton of minecraft, but they're also super into pokemon themed stuff. I don't know how much of the games they play, but I know they're really into the cards right now.

I guess from this we can say the average GB user is in their mid twenties....?

91 and got into Pokemon Red around the same time the anime came out in Australia. I still remember being able to bring in a Game Boy to school and the teacher locking them up in a drawer until the last period of the day where we played until school finished. A group of four or five friends would huddle up together and just play and trade Pokemon around. It was the goddamn best.

Gold/Silver is still the peak of Pokemon for me, that's when I really got obsessed with it but after losing my copy of Crystal and my Game Boy Colour in a neighbourhood park I was so devastated it was pretty much the end of that part of my childhood. I did buy Ruby when it came out but I didn't like the new Pokemon and was pretty much done with the whole thing, until Pokemon X came along which revitalised the series.

89 for myself. Played Blue version having no idea of what RPG's were at the time, but still having fun with it. The most funny thing about my first time playing Blue was that years later I found my cart with that save and saw that I played the entire game leveling just Bulbasuar (and evolving him of course) and having two other pokemon at level 5 and 10.

Silver version was my favorite and I poored so much time into it (and this time I kinda knew what I was doing!) but ever sence then I dropped the series trying to come back to it over the years (including playing some of Y) I just cant get into that type of gameplay anymore.

@slag: @zeik: @viking_funeral: @mezza: All valid points- I'd bet this poll says more about GB's user base than Pokemon fans at large. I'm not putting much stock in it. I do still wonder about Nintendo's current status with kids though (as someone who's not around kids much anymore, I can't really answer that).