Picked up a copy of Pokemon Stadium for the N64 Project this week, Transfer Pak included, from my local game store. No online listing, no shipping wait, just a Saturday afternoon browsing the shelves in person. I say it every time I do this, but it’s worth repeating: local game stores are still worth the trip. You never know what’s sitting in the case until you actually go look.

Pokemon Stadium launched in North America on February 29, 2000, and its history is a little more tangled than most people realize. What we got here wasn’t actually the first Pokemon Stadium at all. Japan had already gotten a much more barebones version in 1998, one with only 42 of the original 151 Pokemon and none of the mini-games people associate with the series now. The version Nintendo localized and shipped to the West was really the Japanese sequel, Pokemon Stadium 2, just renamed for a North American audience that had never seen the original. It’s the reason our Pokemon Stadium already feels so complete right out of the gate: full 151, Gym Leader Castle, mini-games and all. It went on to sell over a million copies here and became the best-selling console game in North America that year, which checks out. Pokemon was absolutely everywhere in 2000, and this was the closest thing to seeing your own Game Boy team rendered in 3D.

A Name That Isn’t Mine

The label on this cartridge has a spot where the previous owner wrote their name, and mine still has someone else’s on it. I like that it’s there, honestly. It’s such a small thing, but it’s a little piece of history I didn’t ask for and got anyway, proof this cart had a whole life before it ever got to me. Some kid, or maybe some adult who should have known better (no judgment, I’d have done the same), sat down with this exact cartridge and battled their way through Gym Leader Castle. I’ll never know who they were, but I like knowing they existed.

Playing It Again as an Adult Who Was Once a Kid About This

I was fully in the target demographic for Pokemon back when this came out, the exact right age to have a Game Boy permanently attached to my hand and a binder of cards I definitely overpaid for. Stadium was the payoff for all of that. You’d spent months grinding out your team on a tiny green screen, and suddenly this game let you watch them fight in full 3D, with animations and camera angles that felt unreasonably impressive at the time. Booting it up now hits different in a way I wasn’t fully prepared for. It’s not just nostalgia for the game itself, it’s nostalgia for exactly what it felt like to be a kid who loved these creatures and finally got to see them move.

The Transfer Pak Makes This Pokemon Stadium Cart Worth Having

None of this works without the Transfer Pak, which is why I was glad mine came with one. The whole point of Stadium was pulling your own Pokemon out of Red, Blue, or Yellow and bringing them into the N64 version, rather than being stuck using the game’s canned rental Pokemon (which, for the record, are rough, some Gym Leader Castle fights are borderline unwinnable with rentals alone). I still have every Gen 1 game on physical cartridge, so this is one of those rare N64 Project pickups that isn’t just standalone, it actually connects to the rest of the collection in a real way. That’s the whole appeal of Stadium to me: it was never really its own game so much as a lens to look at the games you already had.

That puts the N64 Project at 25 out of 296, with 271 to go. Tracker’s been updated.