Some of you may know my username from other places such as GameFAQs or Reddit - most will not. I was a rather prolific helper of people on Gen 1 Pokemon back on GameFAQs up until around the time of Generation 4, and indeed I still pop in to look on occasion. Those of you who know me from Reddit will recall that I posted that I may well have the rarest piece of physical merchandise in the UK - being an authentic and completely un-worn staff uniform from the UK "Pokemon Summer Day Camp" tour in 2007. As for how I got the cable, the Aura Mew distribution at the event in Glasgow on the 2nd of August (The first ever distribution of the Aura Mew in the UK - and the ONLY Scottish distribution date) was initially cancelled due to "technical difficulties" - until a staff member saw myself and a friend playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance round the side of the tent. It transpired that the Nintendo representative had brought a Universal Link Cable (Gameboy Color / Pocket specific) to a GBA distribtution - so naturally it didn't work. The staff asked me to speak to them round the other side and asked what I would like for my link cable (which was a third party 4 player cable - a detail I left out on Reddit and on my Youtube video covering this - the cable had had come from a pound shop GBA bundle). I joked that I would like one of the Nintendo DS Lite hats the staff had. The Event lead went to a nearby van and a minute later I was given the staff uniform top and 2 hats. One of the hats went to the friend who attended with me, as he had arranged the transport. I have no idea what has since happened to that hat as I lost touch with that friend about a decade ago. Anyway, I have kept the staff uniform - and the original bag it came in over the years, and decided to look into it a couple of months ago, then found out that aside from one 2007 topic on Smogon, there is absolutely zero photographic evidence of the staff uniforms on the internet - other than the photographs I uploaded of my own items to IMGUR several years ago. I also still have the original Pokemon Ruby save file and several of the very first Mews that were distributed from that event as I had to make sure the staff knew how to use the 4 player cable correctly for the distribution. This means that I have the very first Aura Mews that were ever distributed in the UK. My reason for signing up here? If there is interest, I still have the save file on Ruby. The save file ALSO has an Eon ticket scanned in courtesy of the same friend who'd attended the 2007 event with me, as he had been the one to import the E-Reader and an Eon Ticket back around 2004 or 2005 - This makes it quite possibly the only save file in the world to not only have the Eon Ticket, but several event-distribution Pokemon which required attendance at in-person events. EDIT : The save file also contains quite a few secret bases from my other cartridges - as well as other people I mixed records with back then. However, the most interesting parts of the save file are the Eon Ticket and event Pokemon, such as the Aura Mew. I have 2 different ways to back up the save file - using the GBA Backup tool I have on my original DS R4 card, and the Gameboy Operator. If there is interest, I can make a fresh backup of the save and upload it here.
That is quite the introduction! If you posted guides on GameFAQs for the earlier games I probably have come across something you posted at some point. High quality photos of the staff uniform and bag, along with your story in a dedicated thread, perhaps in Other Pokemon Downloads that would certainly be another bit of Pokemon history documented, along with a pretty fun story too! The Ruby save would be really great to have uploaded too under User Playthrough Saves, both for the content you mentioned along with the backstory / history to it. It's always nice to see some original saves preserved from what is now 20+ years ago. GBA Backup tool should work perfectly fine for dumping Gen 3 Pokemon Saves, that is what I’ve always used. Thanks for taking the time to post such a great introduction, I’d certainly be interesting in seeing what you have mentioned. I'm sure others would be too.
I didn't post Pokemon guides on GameFAQs, but I have been helping users there on the message boards and the Q&A section since the days when GameFAQs still had chat rooms - and between 2001 and 2005 I was probably one of the most prolific people helping others in the message boards specifically. I also hosted the first R/B/Y mode Netbattle server, back when the original developer, TVSIan, first implemented Gen 1 support (It started out as being purely Gen 2, then added Gen 1 later - then added Gen 3 later. TVSIan stopped working on Netbattle when Nintendo released the ability to have Pokemon battles online with the Gen 4 games in the Nintendo DS era - but released the source code to those who were interested, and now we have stuff like Pokemon Showdown. I've not been involved with Netbattle in almost 20 years, however. Those of you who have read Havak's 2007 topic about the Pokemon Summer Day Camp event will have seen the uniform on the distribution guy photos - sadly heavily watermarked. I do have images of my own on imgur, but due to the changes in UK internet policy and imgur placing an IP ban on UK IP addresses, I can no longer access them without a VPN, but do have links to both the uniform top and the hat. ( https://i.imgur.com/3k8kIE7.jpg and https://i.imgur.com/8tFBIKu.jpg respectively- yes, I do have a VPN tool, I just don't use it often) - those pictures are from 5 years ago, whereas the video on my youtube showcasing the same items was recorded about 2 or 3 weeks ago. Comparison of the pictures and video to the 2007 topic by Havak will show they're the same articles of clothing Anyway - I'll see about getting the save file backed up and shared. It may be a week or two, as I'm about to start my "busy period" with work - essentially 9 days of split shifts - but expect me to post back there with a copy of the save file. (I have my save files from Emerald and Leaf Green back then too, although those saves aren't as interesting, but Sapphire and Fire Red have both been restarted since then) For other games, I've been gaming for over 40 years - I've seen things develop from ASCII art type-in listings in magazines for 7-bit home computers like the ZX-81 up to what we have now. I have a tendency to come across unusual stuff in games without even trying. The first time I ever exploited game mechanics would have been Jetbrix on the Commodore 16 - I noticed that if a column was filled to the second-top row, the player character would be safe on the top row as bricks never spawned there, allowing me to wait out the timer to progress to the next level. During the PS1 days I found how parking on some sidewalks broke police NPC pathing on survival mode, and in recent years I've been guiding people on tricks on how to completely bypass the restrictions on the daily challenges in Ghost Recon Wildlands.
I'll attach the photos from Imgur below as I suspect its a big annoyance for anyone else browsing forums / Reddit in the UK these days. I've set my router up to route certain websites that are either blocked or heavily censored here (like Reddit) though a VPN, then the rest of my traffic out to the internet as normal, so generally the internet works as it should. No problem, feel free to post the save up when time permits. I understand all too well how work gets in the way of things you wish to do! I started gaming back on the Amiga 500, the first computer our family got in the mid 90s. Chaos Engine, The Settlers, Skidmarks, Dizzy, James Pond and Desert Strike are some memorable favourites. I've been in to Pokemon since I got Red on my GameBoy Pocket in 1999. My friend had the game and showed me trading with his brother via the link cable, which my brother and I thought was the most amazing thing ever at the time. We then randomly heard Pokemon Gold / Silver had been released in Japan and had many new Pokemon in the game. A rumour at the time was it was possible to play a translated version of this on the PC. We had no idea what roms and emulators were back then, however with limited dial-up internet access we eventually ended up with the Pokemon Gold Japanese To English Fan Translation By PR Translations, which we spent many weekends playing split screen on with the NO$GMB emulator. At some point a local shop in our town would import the US release of Gold / Silver long before it was released here, so I remember my bother and I got them to import a copy for us. I do love reading about all the hidden things in games on websites like The Cutting Room Floor, along with all the things discovered in beta copies of games.