My cousin who's 2 years older than me was really into Pokemon when he was 9 or 10, one of his friends who later became one of my best friends had Pokemon Blue on Gameboy Pocket, I was never really into Pokemon at all, I never even liked the Anime that much, but I played it and fell in love with the game when everyone was losing interest, I borrowed it off him for like 6 months and eventually G/S came out and silver became my first actually owned Pokemon game.
I was pretty bad at the game back then, Charmelion evolved into Charizard when I was on the SS. Anne and all my other pokemon were under level 10 haha.