CHENNAI: Sidhanth Ashok loved Pokémon so much that he created a Pokémon game of his own. In class 8, he put the Pokémon Fire Red Version that was there on his Game Boy into his PC and hacked into it. “I studied the Hexadecimal coding method to create my own version of this game. It’s still on the internet somewhere. The graphics are not polished enough”. To make up for that, he made the game extremely difficult, and people who played it asked him why would he make it ‘monstrously difficult’.
Born in Kerala, Sidhanth, also known in the rap community as Inner Rhymes, started playing video games when he was seven years old. Before Pokémon, he played Claw, a 2D scroller game. “Although the graphics of Claw seem primitive now, back then, it was one of the first games that combined in-depth story telling and multiplayer concepts,” he says.
Sidhant started playing Pokémon Fire Red when he was 9 on his Game Boy. When he was learning to swim at the Century Club, his father couldn’t find him in the pool. He followed the Game Boy soundtrack to find it coming from one of the bathroom stalls.
As he was constantly shift between Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu between 2005-2012, Pokémon helped him make friends. “In Chennai, when I took out my Game Boy, five others took out theirs and we all played together on our devices. That’s how I made friends there. We connected our devices with a cable and traded different Pokémon.”
He started playing on a Nintendo 3DS. From class 11 on, he began taking Pokémon competitively. On the website pokemonshowdown.com, he began taking part in international level competitions. He was ranked among the top 50 players globally in 2014 and stood at 115th rank in the championship category in 2015. “Pokémon is inspired by Rock Paper Scissors which help predicting attacks and it requires a chess-like strategy planning. I got better at Math because of Pokémon. There is a calculator in my house that I would use for the mathematical part of the game.”
Clocking in about 6,000 hours playing the game on the 3DS, Sidhanth played Pokémon everywhere. Once he filled the last page of his Economics exam paper with Pokémon battle strategy. During a meeting, his teacher told his mother that Sidhanth continuously scribble mathematical stuff in his notebook and suggested that he take up science. Back on his way home, his mother said she would confiscate his 3DS. “But, I didn’t listen to her as I was playing on my 3DS.”
Now Sidhanth lives in Bengaluru. He thinks that Pokémon has become obsolete now, except the one year of Pokémon Go. He plays Pokémon on his newly acquired console called the Retrogame which has an emulator software that allows him to play Game Boy, PlayStation and other device games on this.
