I remember in the early 2000’s, laying on the floor or at the kitchen table with our children & them trying to explain to me, how Pokemon ‘worked’ ! .. I did not fully understand it back then, but their love for Pokemon was strong & a treat at the end of a week for them, was a trip to the local shop’s .. for a Pokemon pack & Hotwheels toy car each ! .. Fast forward to 2025 & a ‘hobbyist’ friend of mine was moving house & found his two full binders of Pokemon collector cards & offered them to me, for my ‘now’ adult children ! .. As you can imagine, they are now late 20’s & living their own lives .. so, they suggested that I might like to do something with them ! .. Here I am, several weeks later & remembering our times of playing on the floor or at the kitchen table with them .. now, I’m 52 & eager to learn more about the hobby ! .. It would be so great to hear of you’re first experiences of or with Pokemon !
I don’t have a heartwarming story I probably just saw it on TV when I was young and thought it looked cool, that or a neighbor gave me a few cards whichever came first
I will never forget this EVER. Walking through the mall with my parents circa 1999 there was a small table, no Pokemon flyers no fancy promotional drop nothing; just a table. They had base set packs laid out on the table, thats it just booster packs. I picked one up and asked my dad if I can please get one he said get three. Bam walked around with them for two hours while my mom shopped. Got home, pulled out the packs and in the first pack POW Holo rare zapdos. Been hooked ever since. After that I was literally ash in my child mind. I’m 33 now and I’m basically still ASH, but with a mustache.
I remember being at a friend’s house when i was like 5 and he was like “want to play pokemon on my gameboy (GBC for reference)” and I was like “what’s that?” and then the rest is history.
That’s awesome that you have the opportunity to revisit Pokemon with your children later in life!
Some of my fondest memories of Pokemon are from when I was a kid with my late father.
I’ve catalogued my first experiences with Pokemon here Probably in greater detail than anyone cares to read 
I’ve loved Pokémon forever. Watched OG show growing up and grew up playing Diamond / Pearl. Gen 4 gang!!!
i collected Pokémon cards as a kid but since I moved and my original collection was destroyed I didn’t really care to look into the cards but just played the games on every release (stopped playing SV era). I still collected YGO bc I played the game and cared more about YGO up till recently 2024 and then switched fully to Pokemon.
I’m a be honest COVID brought me back to collecting Pokemon again and my passion to collecting the cards again. I’m definitely here to stay now that I’ve rebuilt a collection. Also maybe because Konami killed collectibility in YGO is a good reason why I’m so into pokemon nowadays
definitely not “greater detail than anyone cares to read”!! i enjoyed reading it
My first exposure to Pokémon was in late 1999 through the TV series and Pokémon Red on the Game Boy. I was around 11 years old at the time. The Pokémon Trading Card Game followed shortly after, around 2000.
My older brother came back from a birthday party and in the little goodie bag you used to get from birthday parties when you were little was a base set booster pack. He gave me a Staryu and that was my first card.
Fall of 1999. My uncle worked at Funcoland (which is now GameStop). One day my mom dropped me off there to hang out for a few hours and play games in the store. That day my uncle introduced me to Pokemon Red or Blue, I forget which. I played it in the store and got hooked and wanted one for myself.
First I had to get a gameboy. My uncle recommended the special Pikachu Edition Gameboy Color, which included the Yellow Version which was just released. I think their store was sold out, so when my mom came back she drove around with me until we found a store that had them. And so it all began. 
A fellow student in elementary school gifted me this card:
Thought it looked pretty cool and was some kind of UFO before reading the card name lol
From there on, I wanted to get some Pokémon cards myself and did, after that I started to read the Pokémon magazine and then gradually got into further aspects of the franchise, first the anime and general merch, then the games (first PokéPark 2 and years later when I got my 2DS Pokémon Y as the first mainline game) and finally in 2020 also the PokéSpe manga.
How do I get out?
Seppuku.
It was 2007. We did not have much money, so I stole my first Pokemon card from another kid in my grade– who, in retrospect, probably was not doing much better. I was a selfish kid.
At the time, Pokemon was considered ‘baby fare’ and the other kids around me quickly grew out of it. Not me. My family frequented thrift stores and finding anything Pokemon became my holy grail! Most of my childhood collection was stuff other people had discarded, donated, or sold to my family for very cheap. (Think neighborhood kids who wanted to make a few dollars to buy more Airsoft stuff.) My friends had XD: Gale of Darkness on their Gamecube and my sister and I would always go there to watch them play the campaign.
I finally got my own Gameboy Color a couple years later with a few of the games, and then a DSi by 2011.
I received Pokemon Blue and a Game Boy Color in the late 1990s. There is a dusty picture album that shows me holding the game and console in my Superman pajamas. I later upgraded to Pokemon pajamas. I was obsessed with the anime as well and would watch it whenever it was on. I remember opening Pokemon cards over the holidays with family. Instantly hooked. Kids at school loved to trade. I also got into Magic the Gathering around this time too, as the older (“cooler”) kids played with those cards.
Year is 2013-2014 and we had just moved to the west coast, I didn’t have many friends at school but I saw that all the cool kids had their big tins of Pokemon cards. Asked my mom to buy me a tin so I could fit in and she got me the Xerneas EX tin. I remember two things 1) how grateful I felt that my mom understood how i felt and 2) getting zero pulls from all four packs but from then I went from liking ptcg to fit in to actually loving collecting.
I was in my usual afterschool program waiting for my parents to get off of work and I saw some older kids playing the Pikachu Edition Gameboy Color. I walked over and asked what it was and they told me some new monster fighting game. They let me play around for a few minutes before it was time to head home. later that day I asked my parents for the exact game/system combo for my birthday. A few months later I opened the present, and the addiction has now remained for decades. Primarily started with the games and anime and transitioned to the cards around the time of Gym Heroes. Cards took longer to get the addiction since I was huge into Yu-Gi-Oh but man those were the days.
On a side note…. am I really providing my “back in my day story” right now? 
is this our retirement home topic?