Memories of the Pokemon League Summer Trainer Tour 99
We go back in time to 1999 with memories of the Pokémon Summer Trainer Tour, with Jim Roszel
The Pokemon League Summer Training Tour ‘99 kicked off in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on July 10th 1999. It was the first stop on a tour of nineteen different cities in shopping malls across North America. Anyone fortunate enough to attend the events between the ages of seven and fourteen would be able to participate in one-on-one tournaments on Game Boy, provided they brought along their copies of Pokémon Red or Pokémon Blue. They were also able to try out the newly released Pokémon Pinball game and the upcoming Pokémon Snap, and had the opportunity to watch a demonstration of the upcoming Pokémon Yellow title, games which wouldn’t arrive in North America until later that year in September. There was even a designated area for trading card players and collectors, and many free gifts were given away.
Jim Roszel was fortunate to attend the Pokémon Summer Training Tour when it arrived in Ohio, and he has kindly shared his memories of the event with us.
The event took place at Tri-County Mall, north of Cincinnati, Ohio. It wasn’t exclusive, though, it was a multi state stop at shopping malls. At the time it was the perfect place for this sort of thing, in the summer months between school years, indoors, a seemingly safe place to drop your kids off for hours during the day. Now this mall is closed. I imagine a lot of the others are too.
I don’t recall how I heard about the event. It might have been in the newspaper. The Cincinnati Enquirer had a section devoted to entertainment and events in the area called “Metro” at the time; I feel like this is the most likely place for me to have learned about it.
It was the first “big” Pokémon event I went to and I remember lots of crowds, people wearing hats like Ash’s from the cartoon. Lots of excitement around being able to play the game against other people. I knew the game was popular, [since] it was hard to escape the hype, and I had just finished the 8th grade so I wasn’t completely naïve, but I hadn’t seen this many people gathered before. My only previous “event” for Pokémon was running into the Volkswagen Beetle Pikachu cars at the Zoo and getting to try the game out on a TV and Super Game Boy that was in the rear hatch of the car (sounds pretty weird now!). That was all pre-release and it wasn’t until I got home and realized, “Hey, that’s the game that’s been mentioned in Nintendo Power as coming soon.”
Most of the event was set up in the center of the mall, on the first floor near a large fountain. This was the portion of the mall that would be devoted to other visiting dignitaries (local television personalities like the WSTR Star64 Kids Club hosts, Mr. Clean, Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, etc.). There were corralled off groups of tables for various play, lots of televisions with games and cartoon content, and one of the Volkswagen Beetle Pikachu cars. The TCG area was around a bend, near a glass elevator (a memorable landmark) in the mall.
The tour had a video game tournament for Pokémon Red and Blue. Tables were set up in a portioned space and people played Game Boy to Game Boy via Game Link Cable. I believe it was a single elimination format. The top players competed against each other in a separate corral on TVs via Super Game Boy 2, the Japanese only revision to the Super Nintendo Game Boy adapter that included a Game Link Cable port. The TVs were set back to back on a platform on an elevated stage, so the players sat in high top chairs for spectators to see. By participating in the game tournament, you could earn two “badges”: Brock’s Boulder Badge and Misty’s Cascade Badge. Both were artwork of the gym leader’s face and the badge itself on a Pog-like cardboard disc.
There was also an area for the TCG, another large corral with tables set up for playing and trading. I don’t believe there was an organized tournament, but there might have been. At this point the Jungle Expansion would have been brand new, still several months from Fossil being released. There was a promo Jigglypuff card available, I believe (I hope I’m not confusing this with another event).
There were columns set up with TVs built into them, showing gameplay of Pokémon Yellow, Pokémon Pinball and Pokémon Snap, the upcoming additions to the Pokémon game library.
I am first and foremost a fan of catching them all. I love the collecting aspects of Pokémon. Battling is fun, but I have never been someone really knowledgeable about the metagame. My Charizard at the time had a move set like Flamethrower, Firespin, Rage and Cut. Not a contender.
All this to say is I do not recall where I placed. I only saw the Super Game Boy 2s from the floor watching others.
A huge thanks to Jim for sharing his memories of this event with us! It was so cool to read about one of the early Pokémon tours across North America! We hope Jim will one day be able to extract the photograph of him and Pikachu from the floppy disk!
Update: January 28th, 2024: The feature has been updated to include Jim’s photograph from the floppy disk