1998

In 1998, I was technically a couple years too young to start my Pokemon journey, but I did anyway. Don't tell Professor Oak!

Pokemon Yellow was the first game I over owned, and I got it with the special Yellow Edition Game Boy which was cool because I rarely saw them in the wild. I feel like most kids who had Yellow had something really similar to this team except subbing in Mewtwo somewhere [I used him a lot too, really]. Most of my Pokemon's nicknames were ripped from nicknames in the anime/manga because I was creative like that.
These poor guys didn't have their moves planned out well at all - Charizard had three fire attacks and could Fly, Pikachu had two electric attacks and was stuck with Flash forever, and so on. Luckily those games were simple enough that you could be set as long as you had a type advantage, and muscling your way through the game wasn't impossible. All things considered these guys did me well, earning my first League victory.

These guys lasted for years, so they transferred back and forth into Silver, and maybe were even around when Sapphire came out. At some point in time I lost my save, and I really don't know how. I think the internal battery is weak enough that it stopped remembering saves after a certain point in the game, because I have an untouched save in there currently. Sometime between FireRed and Emerald I decided to catch and hatch new versions of every one of these guys, and they've come with me through every Generation ever since.

* Interestingly all but Pikachu have the ability to Mega Evolve now, though only a couple have actually done so in-game. I wouldn't be too surprised if Pikachu got some kind of special boost down the road. Ash-Pikachu?

* Never did get to teach Pikachu to surf! I never even saw the surf minigame in action until years after the fact.

* Somehow I leveled up my Pikachu to level 100 in Victory Road, and then dropped my Game Boy a few minutes later which sent my batteries flying. Had to grind 20 more levels. I did, of course. I got Red later so I could play with the Missingno trick, so Pikachu might have been my only legit level 100 then.

* I don't remember why it happened but somehow I caught Mewtwo with an Ultra Ball. I had that Master Ball around still and nothing to do with it, so what did I do? Threw it at a Rhyhorn on my way out of the Unknown Dungeon and called it a day.