500 Hours in Kanto: My Pokémon Gen 1 Retrospective

A behind-the-scenes look at the weirdest Retrospective I've ever made for Pokémon's 30th anniversary.

Okay so here's the thing about being 34 and voluntarily playing the same Game Boy game four times in a row: at some point you stop asking yourself "am I insane?" and just start building a spreadsheet.

Reader, I built the spreadsheet.

If you've been following along, you already know I'm not the kind of creator who keeps his projects locked in a vault until launch day. So let's talk about the Retrospective I've been quietly pouring my soul (and roughly 500 hours of my life) into in between big, sexy JRPGs:a look back at Pokémon Generation 1. Red, Green, Blue, Yellow... the whole gray-brick lineage that ate our childhoods and our AA batteries.

The ENTIRE Generation One Saga

One thing I want to do differently with this Retrospective is cover the whole of Generation 1, not just the two carts I grew up with.

That meant digging into the development history of the games we didn't get in the West as well as an in-depth look at the ones that did make it over:

• Red and Green, the original Japanese releases, and the six-year development marathon that nearly bankrupted Game Freak.
• The Japan-exclusive Blue Version, which started life as a glorified bug-fixing exercise for new hires and accidentally became the template for every English release that followed.
• Red and Blue finally hitting North America in September 1998, riding the anime's coattails into every schoolyard argument about whether Charizard made Red the objectively superior cartridge. (It didn't. I had Blue. I'm still not over it.)
• Yellow Version, the "Special Pikachu Edition" that bent the games toward the anime and let a clingy little electric mouse follow you around Kanto.

The 500 Hour Playthrough

Remember I mentioned a spreadsheet?

For this project I didn't just want to beat the games — I wanted to play them with intent. So I set myself some rules: build teams around creative themed nicknames, use Pokémon I normally never touch, and then build even more teams to take on every cup in the N64 Pokémon Stadium.

Then I did it across Blue, Red, Yellow, AND the Yellow Legacy romhack. No speed-up, no save states, just the raw Gen 1 experience. Blue alone clocked in at over 100 hours because it was my first ever Pokémon game and I refused to rush it.

Add in the Stadium challenges and a second full Blue playthrough just to capture footage, and I'm sitting at just over 500 hours in Generation 1 in the year 2025.

The Real Reason This One Matters to Me

In March 2025, my wife and I found out we were going to be parents. Our son arrived at the end of the year, and somewhere in there I realized this Retrospective had quietly become more than a video.

It's a time capsule. A slice of the me who was learning how to become a dad at the exact same time he was pouring himself into something he loves. Something I can hand to my kid one day when he's finally old enough to know what a Bulbasaur is.

That's why 500 hours was worth it. Every single one.

Want to know when the Retrospective goes live? Subscribe to the blog and check out the YouTube Show for more Retrospectives.