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I don’t know if it’s because PAX East is in Boston, where I ended up accidentally wandering into a cemetery full of 17th century gravestones the other night, or the fact that I was asked by TSA before my flight over here where my parents were, but the passage of time has been on my mind this weekend. Here at PAX East, I’m only a stone’s throw from where the Boston Tea Party is memorialized. To attend PAX East is to reckon with history. 

And boy, have I been reckoning. On Friday morning, I was walking the show floor at PAX East when I walked along the backside of the Pokémon booth. Across the length of the back wall was a timeline of all the Pokémon games, and I stopped to think about which games I had played, and which games I hadn’t. I found myself gravitating towards the oldest part of the timeline, because I remember playing all of the games that came out before 2007 when I was a child. It was then that I had to confront the fact that my favorite games in the series, Ruby and Sapphire, came out in 2003.

Cue the ominous church bell sound effect. 

2003. 2003?! When did normal things that I never thought twice about become Pokémon games that came out in 2003? Standing there on the show floor, my body slowly turning to stone, I had to come to terms with how my favorite Pokémon entries were now old enough to have graduated from college and order a drink at a bar. There is now probably a whole generation of Pokémon fans who have never even played Ruby or Sapphire because they were born too late. How did I end up going from a kid hunched over a GameBoy Advance who wasn’t allowed to play video games on Sundays to an adult human attending a gaming convention for work? Am I even here because I sank all that time into Sapphire and Ruby more than two decades ago, rendering them timeless to me? And now I sound like that one guy having an existential crisis in the background at the nerd convention. 

This effect is not solely limited to Pokémon. I would imagine that Bond/007 and Final Fantasy fans feel similarly. Maybe even Planet of the Apes fans, but who even knows what their feelings are, as Apes fans move in silence. Hell, this phenomenon isn’t even limited to nerd media. I was walking around the convention yesterday wearing a Josh Beckett Red Sox shirt I’ve had since 2007, itching to talk about the mid-00s Red Sox with anyone (I found someone).

The things we invest our time and feelings into slip through our fingers like sand. If we don’t stop to look up and take in the broader picture of time around us, we risk burying ourselves. I’ll stop myself there before I try thinking of a way to invoke M. Night Shyamalan’s Old. 

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