I got these in a folder from an eBay listing and I thought it’d be nice to make scans of everything for posterity, as it’s from a long ago time in competitive Pokemon. I think this was an early GameBoy tournament. Enjoy!
There was a series of Game Boy tournaments that summer in local malls across the country. You played two matches and if you won both, you played a staff member (who generally took it easy on kids) for the chance to win a special cap.
They had a bunch of side events (sing the Poke Rap, win some booster packs) but the big draw was they’d download a legitimate Mew to your Game Boy Color save file. This was why I begged my parents to drive me there, and as far as I know (I’m not an expert on this) it was the only legitimate way to get a Mew on your cartridge (without a GameShark or some other manipulation).
This is really cool and you really got everything. I might have a photo of the Pikachu car myself somewhere, but this is roughly what it looked like (might be the same one, it was definitely a VW Beetle with ears and red cheeks):
Your badge book’s also great. I have mine filled out back at my parents’ house. Just let me know if you’re curious about anything regarding it.
The badges you have (the eight pins) were won entirely by playing the Pokemon TCG. You could bring your book to any card shop authorized to host Pokemon League events, most of which had 2-3 hours/week reserved for kids to do this. I played at my local Toys’R’Us from 9 a.m. - 12 p.m. on Saturdays and sometimes another small local toy store on Sunday in the early afternoon.
After getting 50 stamps in your badge book (it was one stamp per 10 points, from your screenshot - you got most from playing the game, it was 1 stamp for playing and 2 stamps total for winning), you’d get one of the pins you showed. Getting three badges was one of the ways you could attend certain TCG tournaments (provided you also showed up on time and they hadn’t filled the brackets to capacity already).
Wow, nice to see that car. I wonder who owns it now. Thanks for the picture! And that’s great you were part of that experience. I never had enough cards to make a competent deck and I was always too shy to compete anyways back then.
From what you’re saying you would’ve had to grind a lot for those badges! So it would be like 25-50 matches per badge, depending on how good you were?
I notice there’s also space in the book for TMs. I guess before the internet was big maybe the tips would’ve actually been helpful. Did you collect those too?
I have my badge book too, I wasn’t great at making it to the events so I only have so many stamps in it. Still cool to have after all these years. If you don’t mind I’ll post of a photo of it.
Yup, 25-50 matches per badge! Though you could also get a stamp just for attending each week, and once per week for trading. The rest were more infrequent but they’re detailed in your badge book.
I can’t fully remember, but I think the TMs were just stickers with TCG battling tips that you could put in your badge book. It was a sign of full completion, but not much else. Most kids got enough stamps to get the badge and then immediately moved to the next page to progress toward the next badge (to use their stamps there, instead of on the TM, until they got all 8 badges… I don’t think too many got all 8 badges, though, because of how much time it took).
No problem! I’d love to see a badge book that’s seen some use. The one I have is completely blank because the ebay seller when he was a kid, got the materials but was too late to enter the event. According to him the line was out the door to the parking lot, and by the time he got to the front it was too late to start any of the card or Gameboy competitions. Luckily for me, it meant I got a pristine copy of the materials!
Ah so you had to trade stamps for them, makes sense that most kids wouldn’t do it then. I wonder what kind of tips they had, like ‘don’t play all the cards in your hand at once’ or something, haha.
@viridian I’ll take some photos when I get home. I remember building decks and trying to play others but relying on your parents to take you to go play a card game isn’t always going to happen haha!
Sure go ahead. I was just thinking that someone should compile a database of all this stuff, and now I see that you have! That’s great lol. Someday I might make a youtube video about Pokemon history with some of the stuff on your site. Thanks for the link.
The Pikachu Beetle and Lugia PT Cruiser shown in that picture belong to Mewisme700 on Instagram. She is restoring both of them and takes them to conventions around the east coast
She’s a really interesting collector. One of the premier collectors in the world and she doesn’t even touch trading cards. That demonstrates how broad Pokémon as a hobby can really be.
Found my old Badge Book and figured I’d send a couple filled-out images. Forgive the terrible scans, they’re quick ones from a phone app.
Basically, I really, really love that you shared your finds. I think both the Summer Training Tour '99 and the Badge Book are absolutely core/fundamental to the early Pokemon TCG in the US (the tour itself may have been the launch of the TCG in America, period).
And here are 6 of my old badges (two are in a box under some other boxes lol), some of which have yellowed. Looking at the backs, the ones that have yellowed are copyrighted 1999, and the ones that have stayed relatively white are copyrighted 2000. It may be that they switched the quality of the materials used to manufacture the pins between the two years (though that’s just speculation).
Wow, this is really cool, thank you! You really grinded a lot of battles!
As for the badges theory, I checked and some of my 2000 ones are also yellowed while others are white. But none of the 1999 ones are not yellow, so it could be plausible I think!
Thinking out loud here.