A Pilgrimage to NYC for the Pokemon Black & White Launch Event

The word 'Pilgrimage' is often defined as a journey -- especially a long one -- made to some sacred place as an act of religious devotion, but it also means any long journey undertaken as a quest to pay homage to a symbol or a location, and it is the latter rather than the former that applies to this article, though after this weekend I could see how religion might apply to the world of Pokemon for some of its more intense fans.

Much of last Friday was spent preparing for the pilgrimage -- deciding what to take for a one-day visit to New York City, working out the travel logistics, and coordinating with the group of journalists that would make up the party members. But more on that later... Now let's focus on the event itself and the reasons and motivations that caused a group of otherwise sane adults to make this journey together.

Anwar B., 19, from Baltimore, Austen W., 19, from Jacksonville, Florida, and Lauren V., 25, from Cold Spring, New York, pose with larger-than-life inflatable Pokemon from the Pokemon Black Version and Pokemon White Version video games at the Day-Before-Launch-Day Event outside of Nintendo World NYC Saturday -- they were typical of the crowd that gathered for the event both in age and enthusiasm.

Unless you have been intentionally avoiding gaming news, you know that yesterday was the official Launch Day for the newest generation of Pokemon games -- Pokemon Black and Pokemon White -- which number among the most anticipated offerings in the series. In fact only Pokemon Ruby and Pokemon Sapphire garnered the sort of buzz and anticipation that we saw this weekend, largely for similar reasons.

Ruby and Sapphire represented the move to a new platform, the Game Boy Advanced, which goes a long way towards explaining the excitement that attached to their Launch Day events. While the release of Black and White does not include a move to a new platform -- like Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum they were made for the DS family of hand-held game consoles -- in many ways the impact is the same. What am I talking about?

When Ruby and Sapphire launched it was not just a new generation of the hand-held console that differentiated them from the previous generation of games in the series, it was a revamping of the whole graphical interface and the way in which the world and its characters were presented. In a nutshell it was a reinterpretation of the game world.

Everything was different and yet the same -- the characters had two distinct forms; the first was the anime-like form that appeared in the cut-scene animations, presenting a very realistic if cartoonish take of the protagonists, while the second form -- which represented the image of the protagonist in actual game play -- while it was closer to the original style, retained a distinct and different new feel to it.

A live musical performance by The Presidents of the United States of America including the world debut of a new Pokemon song to celebrate the U.S. launch for Pokemon Black & White.

Of course it was not just the main characters that received a new image -- the world and, more important than that -- the images of the Pokemon that represent the focus of the game also received a new form in the game. In spite of the mostly minor changes this new treatment of an old and well liked set of gaming icons made, it was more than enough to garner excitement among the fan base.

When you factor in the changes to combat, to collecting, and to the overall mechanics of the game, when it is all combined it delivers the other half of the equation and completes the picture, defining the spark that set off the stampede to obtain the game on Day 1 and dig right in to it. Within hours of the games going on sale, the chat boards online were abuzz with the first impressions of the hundreds of thousands of veteran gamers who quite literally grew up playing Pokemon games. And the word was good -- the fans were happy -- and fears that the sweeping changes would somehow alter the familiar feeling and identity of the Pokemon experience turned out to be baseless.

The New Pokemon Experience -- Black & White

As soon as you hit the power button on your DS the first and stunning newness is thrust upon you! The black copyright screen that is so familiar to the series of games slips into a new version of the splash screen for developer Game Freak, and then the opening animations of the game begin to play as a series of slow-moving vignettes backed by appropriate music that together instantly communicate that something new and different has happened -- is happening now -- in the world of Pokemon!

Normally the start is about the Trainers and the very essence of the game, the Pokemon themselves -- but in Black and White we see a crown being carried towards a throne by characters who look like they would be more at home in a game by Square Enix, not Nintendo... As the crown reaches the throne and it is placed on the head of the fair-haired young man who carried it along the long aisle the quick glimpses into the past that we are shown reveal that this new King -- and many of the onlookers -- is or was a Pokemon Trainer!

More than 10,000 Pokemon fans waited in line at Nintendo World in New York on March 5, 2011, to be among the first in the U.S. to purchase Pokemon Black and Pokemon White.

Quickly then the scene changes to the more traditional montage we are used to, complete with rapid upbeat music and a very quick and very brief series of images that depict a Trainer running along the elevated pedestrian bridge of a futuristic city; a Pokemon falling into its bed; a Trainer passing through a mysterious barrier that transforms them; a panning shot of a Trainer and Pokemon; finally a battle scene -- and all the while the words "Hopes!", "Dreams!", and "Discoveries! appears on the screens, and then a simple promise that "Adventures await you and your Pokemon!" ends the montage.

The screen then changes to a simple but elegant Start Screen, the music plays, and the potential that is promised by all of this imagery and sound is clearly there... Hiding just below the surface of the plastic and silicone, waiting for you to do one simple but necessary task: hit the Start Button.

A New Professor in So Many Ways

This newest generation of games is just full of surprises -- starting with the new Professor that you know has to be waiting for us, because that is how this works. A Professor greets us, fills us in on the basic facts of this new and exciting world and the journey we are about to begin, and then leads is -- if not by the hand, then certainly in spirit -- to the door that leads to the first steps of what will certainly be an incredible journey!

But this time when the lights come on and the welcome is given, it is not by a crusty old but brilliant Pokemon Master, or a young and energetic man who has spent his entire life studying the genetics of these Pokemon creatures. No, in their place is a woman!

"Hi there! Welcome to the world of Pokemon! My name is Professor Juniper," she says, all the while tossing a Poke Ball into the air and catching it. "Everyone calls me the Pokemon Professor!," she explains, and then she tosses the Poke Ball that she was holding to the ground and a soft and furry mouse-like Pokemon of a type we have never seen before errupts from within, waving at you as if to say "Welcome!" itself.

Your new character (left) and Professor Juniper -- the first female Professor in the Pokemon Series!

"That's right! This world is widely inhabited by mysterious creatures called Pokemon!" the Professor announced. "Pokemon have mysterious powers. They come in many shapes and live in many places. We humans live happily with Pokemon! Living and working together, we compliment each other. We help each other out to accomplish difficult tasks. Having Pokemon battle one another is particularly popular, and it deepens the bonds between people and Pokemon," she says, now deep into her orientation speech.

"That is why I research Pokemon," she declares, but that is the end of the orientation chat, because now she wants to know about you -- are you a boy or a girl? What is your name? Once you tell her, she introduces you to your two best friends, a boy named Cheren who is honest, studious, and smart, but a bit difficult at times -- and a girl named Bianca who is a bit ditsy (she is a blonde after all) but although she has a simple outlook on life she is a hard working and loyal friend! You could do worse...

Professor Juniper believes that together as a trio, you three have great potential, and because of that, she has decided to give you what she calls "very important Pokemon," cautioning you that the moment you choose which Pokemon it is that will accompany you on your journey, your story will only then truly begin. After a brief discussion of what it is she expects you will experience, your meeting with the good Professor ends, and you see your mate Cheren approaching your house and going inside!

He finds you in your room -- and mate I have to admit, you have some nice kit in there! Big flat screen TV, a Wii, a PC, and it is a lot cleaner than I would have expected. Cheren finds you standing in the center of your room looking at the gift-wrapped package that the Professor sent over, telling you what you already know -- there are three Pokemon balls inside for you and your two mates to choose from.

After Bianca appears -- late which is usual for her -- you are ready to make your choice, and thus a different take on the long familiar process of obtaining your very first Pokemon comes full-circle!

The Adventure Begins?

I always choose the Fire-type when I start a new game -- call it a weakness or a rut, I don't know -- but this time the decision is a little harder because they all look cute... Being a creature of habit though, I stick to my established pattern, and I expect you did as well, and with that decision and the naming of your first Pokemon, your adventure really begins.

The differences that were alluded to above that set this Pokemon game apart from all that came before it are now very obvious as Bianca pushes you into your first battle -- the Pokemon are clearly Pokemon, but they are drawn very different than what you are used to -- as are the Trainers and the other people in the game. More startling is the new battle screens -- the motion that until now was never a part of the process -- and a constant reminder that this generation of game is meant to be played with others, a point that is illustrated by the network status line that fills the top of the lower screen on your DS.

Once again the world is re-interpreted in a new and exciting way. Pictured here is a street scene from the game illustrating the new world.

There is nothing for it mate, you have to battle her, and hopefully you will win that battle, which will be a good luck symbol on the many hours of adventure that are in your future. The process of battling appears to be engineered to encourage the use of the touch screen rather than the more traditional buttons, and in spite of her attempts to weaken your defenses, you should easily be able to take out Bianca's Pokemon. Good on ya mate!

Of course the results of this battle include a now completely trashed bedroom -- you probably should have paid attention to Cheren's caution earlier... And hey, it is trashed already so why not have a battle with Cheren as well? Why not indeed! And so the energy and the attitude of the game is set in the opening moments that follow your acquiring your new Pokefriend, and it is all down-hill from here!

But this is not where the journey actually began, contrary to what it says on the screen. The journey actually began in the lobby of Boston's South Station, where a very helpful Red Cap from Amtrack used the Public Address System to let my mates know I was waiting for them by the News Stand...

It All Began on a Train

Within seconds of the announcement the first of the half-dozen party members appeared -- a girl whose 'nym is Columbine (after the flower) and who looks an awful lot like Bianca... In tow behind her on the invisible rope that permanently connects them to each other is her significant other, a young man who is a graduate student at MIT by day, and a serious Pokemaniac by night, who goes by the pseudonym Ranger Bob. They greeted me with great enthusiasm and then like myself, scanned the crowd for the rest of our gang.

Carlos, Annie, DM (short for Dennis Murphy -or- Danger Mouse depending upon his mood at the time of the asking), and Triple-Z (a goth girl who claims she is the female counterpart to Vin Diesel's Triple-X) each make their way to the News Stand that sits at the heart of the lobby of South Station.

Around us a thick crowd of Saturday morning travelers buy coffee and magazines, eat breakfasts purchased from one of the many counters that occupy the entire west side of the lobby, and do the things that traveling people do who are completely unaware that a group of Master Pokemon Trainers are gathered within their midst.

As I always do my choice was no choice at all -- I went with the Fire-type starter -- in this case a cute little pig with a heart of fire called Tepig!

Like myself, Carlos and DM are journalists, while Ranger Bob and Annie are Graduate Students at MIT. Collie (what we actually call Columbine) and Z are both students at Harvard, but we forgive them for that. In theory we are all going to New York to attend the special Day-Before-Launch-Day event at the Nintendo World Store (what used to be the NYC Pokemon Center), but in reality Carlos, DM, and I are going because we have been assigned to cover the event for work, which is really serendipity because we'd have gone anyway.

A quick trip to the the News Stand proper to purchase beverages and snacks is all that we have time for before the Red Cap comes over to gather us up -- we have to board the train early because of my chair -- and the Red Cap leads us out to the platform where a supervisor has tracked down the key to the safe that they keep the special small aluminium devices that span the gap between the platform and the car (a sort of folding ramp that is specially designed for this purpose). They keep them locked up because they are made out of aluminium, which is actually worth quite a bit as scrap, and someone keeps stealing them if they are not kept secured.

I roll onto the train and find that the Red Cap has already arranged a spot for us at the end of the car that is next to the snack car -- always a cool thing -- and after I back my chair in, he plugs me into the outlet without asking. Let me tell you something, if you are handicapped and you need to travel, the train beats the hell out of airplanes any day of the week! The people that work for Amtrack are spot-on the best, and they take good care of you!

As we sit and watch what DM refers to as hoi palloi begin to board, finding seats and making noise as they throw their bags into the overhead racks and settle in. Sooner than you would think possible the train is full, the doors are shut and South Station is sliding past us as we pull out. This train will head along the coast south, passing through Rhode Island and Connecticut before arriving at Penn Station, where we will transfer to a subway for the short second leg of our journey.

While we had planned to sit and chat our conversation is interrupted throughout the entire trip as other passengers moving along the aisle towards the snack car, with its cold sandwiches and hot and cold beverage service drawing them to it. The reason they interrupt us is that they invariably spot one of the Pokewalkers that we all have clipped to our jackets -- small red and white devices in which we have each transferred a Pokemon who we are in the process of leveling.

Once they are moved from the game to the Pokewalker, our Pokemon levels up using the steps we take as recorded by the motion-sensing device that came as part of the standard package with Pokemon Pearl and Diamond. There are other things you can do with the device -- mini-games and treasure hunts of a sort -- but most notably if you happen upon another Trainer who has one, the two devices can be linked together to exchange gifts -- and that is what happens constantly as the train hurtles along south to New York City.

Your two new best friends in the world are Bianca and Cheren

None of us actually complained about this -- it was why we had the small round devices attached in plain sight on our jackets rather than tucked away in a pocket.

By the time we reached New York we had met over a hundred Pokemon Trainers who, like us, were headed to the Nintendo World Store at Rockefeller Center. The object of our pilgrimages? Officially the new games -- Pokemon Black and Pokemon White -- do not go on sale until the following day, Sunday March 6th -- but anyone who attends the Saturday event has the privilege of obtaining the game a day early. And as it turns out a LOT of Pokemon fans in the Boston area wanted it a day early.

They were not all Trainers -- it turned out that around a third of the people we met and linked Pokewalkers with on the train were actually Pokemon Breeders, while a much smaller handful were professional Trainers whose raison d'être was the science of breeding and then raising fighting Pokemon.

They had a scientific approach in which every aspect of the process of raising their Pokemon was carefully aimed at leveling both the visible statistics and abilities, and the ones you cannot see that determine just how effective a specific Pokemon will be in battle. These were Trainers on a whole other level than what our group was all about...

Where it was enough for us to have completed our Poke Dex and have several teams of Pokemon that we use for different types of tourney play, these Trainers were hard core. They were, to put it simple, the ones you always see winning the top slots in their categories at the regional tournaments and special events. For all I know they win the top slots at the National and International events as well -- I have never actually attended one of those because none of the editors I work for have, so far, been willing to send me to Hawaii or Japan to cover them. Sigh.

Nintendo World New York City

Was a madhouse.

We knew that there would be a crowd -- this was not our first ride on the trolley after all -- but when we arrived in the general vicinity of Rockefeller Center it was bedlam mixed with rock concert, add a few cups of The Pope, and then mix briskly with a jigger of where did all of these people come from?! and you should get an idea of what we were seeing. And we were arriving relatively early!

Well, not really, as it turns out that a large chunk of the people we were seeing as we rolled past the last block or so of the line had been there since oh-my-God-thirty that morning. Rumor was that some of them had actually been in line since the night before but we could not confirm that.

There was excitement -- make no mistake -- and the closer that the clock got to 11 the more palpable and audible that excitement grew. But the crowd was an odd mixture, made up of about half children with their parents or some sort of designated adult protector, and half adults who also happen to be Pokefans.

A case could easily be made that many of the adults who were in line started their journey as children when they played their first Pokemon game -- after all the games have been around now for over fifteen years -- but that was not as big a deal as it would have been if this had been an event for, say, Sailor Moon or Hamtaro, which would have made that large number of adults rather icky if you think about it...

Everywhere you looked there were battles, records being mixed, and even Pokewalkers linking up. We were surprised to see a fairly large number of Game Boys (as in the first version of the platform) with the distinct square colorful red, blue, yellow, and silver cartridges from the original games. And they were battling! Cables -- physical cables -- linking their ancient gaming devices together. How cool was that? Very cool indeed!

At the special launch event, attendees had the opportunity to purchase the games early -- and many did as you see here!

A man had a blanket laid out on the sidewalk around the corner mid-way along the line, his tools spread out before him, and boxes of batteries sitting beside him. As we watched, Pokefans brought him orginal GB and GBA cartridges and he deftly opened them, preforming surgery right there on the sidewalk to swap-out their long-dead internal batteries with new life-giving replacements.

The line of people called him Dr. Nintendo, and he was doing a brisk business at his open-air surgery. It turned out that very few of the original games and a significant chunk of the GBA generation games still have working internal batteries -- and depending on the game, without a working battery they cannot be played. Some games just cannot save, while others lose the internal clock function if the backup battery is dead, which means that any time-based event cannot happen.

It turns out that replacing the batteries was a mixed proposition -- with some being a simple matter of using a special tool to open the cartridge and then sliding the old battery out and a new one in (total cost including the battery? $20), while others -- most notably the GBA versions -- required Dr. Nintendo to use his soldering iron to remover the old battery and then install the new one (total cost? $35 to $40 depending upon the battery type).

An informal survey of his customers felt that the while-you-wait surgery was a wonderful thing, and they were happy to have their old games back revived and as good as new. This set me to wondering what would happen to the modern DS games -- they don't appear to have the sort of structure that suggests such an approach would be possible -- but according to Dr. Nintendo it can be done. It is amazing that so modern a device is still dependent upon a tiny watch battery -- where is that non-volatile memory you have been promising us, Science?!

Our Goal in Sight

We bypassed the lines -- hey, I make no apologies for the fact that as press, we have certain privileges that are necessary to the smooth completion of our appointed duties. Standing in lines would make it impossible to do our jobs, and besides, we paid for our games, it is not like we got them for free. I am just saying

Via the press liaison a trio of Boston-based journalists and their "assistants" had a wonderful time interviewing and writing notes, and otherwise doing journalistic things -- or trying very hard to appear to be doing journalistic things -- but before we knew it the allotted three hours had passed and we needed to return to the station to catch our ride back to Boston.

On the train heading north the atmosphere was much more subdued, but not because of anything bad. No, mostly it was because we had our headphones on, and our faces tucked into our DS's as we got our first taste of Pokemon Black (we all decided on Black because it features the city rather than the woods of White). I could not hear the train noises but I could feel them -- mostly though, my attention was turned towards forming my opinion of my two new best friends -- Cheren and Bianca.

Bianca is such a goof!

The Photos used to illustrate this piece were provided by Nintendo of America via the Business Wire press resource service. Illustrations for this piece were taken from the video game Pokemon Black, and from resources provided by Nintendo and Game Freak.

Posted: 7th Mar 2011 by CMBF
Tags: Pokemon Black, Nintendo DS,