Listen, well this is a pretty crazy story...
When the anime started airing in Lithuania (around 2005) I was 7. None of my friends were following it as much as me and my best friend were. I was dreaming of a pokemon game, at the time i had no idea that such thing existed, since video games weren't a thing back then, so guess what i did..
I made my own pokemon game. XD SOMEHOW i managed to download myself a gen I and II offline pokedex, i also found the list of all anime episodes, so for every episode i would randomly choose a pokemon in that pokedex, and battle/catch it while acting the battle using my hands... It gets worse...
Somehow i found a bag of thrown away circly thingies with pokemon pics on them, i took it home, remeber some of them were wet so i dried them, and used them to act the battles instead of my hands..
a year or 2 later my friend sent me an emulator with pkmn ruby destiny(i didn't know it was a hack at the time) and still am very grateful that he did that. Later i found more about emulators and got in to Nintendo. And the first OFFICIAL pokemon game I played was Yellow, since some douche in Yahoo! Answers inaccurately answered "What is the first pokemon game?"
Later i beat the rest of the games excluding Silver,HeartGold,Black,Black2.
So that's the story, hope it's not too boring to read :D