So when I was in middle school, I first heard of the pokémon craze. Kids were playing it, talking about it, and I wanted in on that. I got a game boy for Christmas, along with the blue version of the game. I played the heck out of that game, catching all the pokémon I could, leveling them up, reading strategies. When the next games came out I got those as well.
As I grew older, the pokémon franchise did as well. They made a new generation of pokémon where the stats were fundamentally different, as such the older pokémon could not be transferred to the new games. Everything after that cutoff however could be moved forward each time there was a new game. I collected pokémon for years. I saved all the rare or once a game pokémon. I saved pokémon that had a special place in my heart, like my team (generally the only pokémon I named) that I played through each game with. I even got legal copies of the pokémon you couldn’t get from the game at all, mew, jirachi, and celibi. Along with a mewtwo named Jessica that I specifically made sure had the proper personality, that I got only speed and special attack EVs. All those special pokémon got moved from old game to new game up until pokémon SoulSilver came out.
In my opinion HeartGold and SoulSilver was the pinnacle of pokémon. The game was everything I had ever wanted, it had the pokéwalker which was a huge hit, and I spent tons of time getting all the pokémon that I had collected over the past decade onto my SoulSilver game.
I never actually found out what happened, but my theory is that one day I had gotten a new video card for my computer, and all the packaging was on my desk. When I threw away that packaging, my SoulSilver cartridge was on my desk and somehow got collected up and thrown out.
It was a few weeks (I wasn’t actively playing the game at the time, hence why it was out of the game boy) before I went looking for it and couldn’t find it. It took another few months of desperate searching before I had to finally admit that the game cartridge was gone, and with it was every pokémon I had ever collected.
My husband tells me that I was actually in mourning. For several weeks I would just stop in the middle of what I was doing and lament that my pokémon were gone. Even now, years later I still wish I had them. Just because they represented so much of my childhood and the memories there.
Unless you played pokémon like I did, it’s unlikely that you really understand the loss involved. I mean it was just a video game, after all. However, this event in my life has made it super clear to me that some things are irreplaceable. Even if I played all the games again (and I did try this briefly) the collection would never be the same as it was.
As such, I do not even take a chance that one day I might wake up having lost all of the stories that I have written over much the same period of time. I daily back up the stories from my laptop to my desktop, which in turn backs them up to an external drive overnight. Once a week I zip the files up and upload them to both Google Drive and my own website, as a college professor once warned us, a backup in the same physical location as the original is not a backup.
I still mourn my lost pokémon but I choose to look at it as a price I was willing to pay in order to never have to suffer through losing all the work I’ve done on my stories. And perhaps this little nudge from me will convince someone else to back up important files so they never find themselves without a backup.
