Who I am
Hey there, so my name is Gavino, but online I go by the handle of “
Nygenn” pronounced “
Nai-djen” and have been since the mid 90’s. If you ever come across a Nygenn anywhere, with this exact spelling then it’s almost assuredly me.
I am a 16 year old male with 14 years of additional experience.
I am video game designer from the Netherlands, specialized in interface-, concept- and character- design, and with a passion for stories, character creation and development, and world building.
Obviously I have an extensive history in video games and tabletop role playing, but also in anime/manga, TV series, movies, and even sports if you’ll believe it. I’m a pretty well rounded guy that way.
You can find links in my signature towards various profiles of mine, in case you are curious to the anime's I've seen, or the manga's I've read, or the games I play on steam, etc.
How I got here
It begins with Pokémon Go actually. I haven’t really been busying myself with Pokémon since the original Red and Blue games, however have always been very intrigued the concept of Pokémon and it’s setting. So when Pokémon Go came out I got hit with some nostalgic emotions and decided that it would be cool to do a Pokémon Role Play. So I hit the internet to see if there was any inspiration to be had and low and behold I stumbled upon the forum of Pokecharms. There I read about the RP format and the spelling lecture and decided I might as well give this a try, never done a forum RP before.
As it so happens the first link I clicked on was
Astralkitsune’s Role Play Campaign
The Dark Tournament. It looked interesting so I just made an account and got to posting. The reception was much better than I expected and what started as a quick try became an everyday passion now. I learned that I’m not as bad a writer as I always thought myself to be, and that I prefer Role Playing like this over Table Top adventures.
My joining was about a month ago and it’s only yesterday that I remembered there was a whole forum and website to explore beyond that one RP channel.
So that would be why I hadn’t posted here yet.
How I got into Pokémon
*Takes out his grandpa chair and plops down in it.*
Many years ago, when most of you were still small children and some of you may not even have been born yet, I was a budding young teenager completely absorbed into the Trading Card Game: Magic the Gathering.
In those days the internet wasn't as reliable as it is these days, what with dial-up connections, slow speeds and limited websites. Especially board and card game related ones. Instead, we bought magazines in order to read up on the latest developments and releases and prices.
It was in one such magazines that I saw my very first Pokémon. It was a print of a Scyther card.
Excited about something so wicked looking and eager to pick up more games, I sat down for hours with that one image and tried to figure out how the game would work based on the information on the card and my understanding of Card Game fundamentals (
looking back now I actually got remarkably close).
In any case... where was I? Oh yes, right.
Well that image was my one and only connection to Pokémon for a long while, and after a couple of months I had all but forgotten about it. But then a neighbor of mine, whose father was a comic book collector, would be driving to a comic convention halfway across the country (
that's actually only about an hour drive in the Netherlands). They asked me along and of course I accepted. I had never been to such an event before after all.
The convention was a magical place for me. I saw images of cool heroes and monsters, piles of comics of superheroes that I recognized from cartoons, and of course whole sections dedicated to Trading Card Games.
Wandering through the row of stalls there I eventually arrived in the back, where I found a small, sad little table tended by an elderly lady. She had mostly junk stalled out but one thing caught my eye. It was a box with Pokémon booster packs. The name tickled a memory stored away in the back of my mind somewhere. I asked the woman about it and she showed me a couple of the cards she had on display. I recognized it then, those card frames. This was the game I had tried to figure out for myself sometime earlier.
Excited I fished deep into my pants pockets and pullet out my feeble allowance. I only had a few guilders with me, (
the currency of the Netherlands before we made the switch to Euros). It wasn't enough but it was all I had.
I remember the woman eyeing me up and down and then leaning over conspiratorially.
"I shouldn't be doing this because I'm just watching the stall for someone else," she whispered, "but I'll sell you one for half price."
I was ecstatic as you can expect. I think more from that fact that she would give me a discount than my actually acquiring the Pokémon Booster. Either way, I paid and carefully opened the package.
With Magic there was always at least one rare card in a booster and I was eager to see if Pokémon followed the same formula. It didn't really matter much soon after because I found that Scyther card, that got me first interested in the game, between the stack. That day I started my Pokémon collection and set out to collect all 151 different cards.
I had told my kid brother all about this of course, and not a month later he came back from the store with the Gameboy games Pokémon Red and Blue.
My Pokémon game experiences
I remember back in the mid to late 90's when my younger brother, a pre-teen at the time, came home one day after having gone shopping with our mother. He had been such an adorable and good boy that he was allowed to pick out something from the toy store.
We hadn't seen Pokémon on TV yet but a few weeks earlier I had told him what little I knew about it due to Trading Card games and he'd remembered apparently. So he picked out the Pokémon games Red and Blue, somehow convincing our mother that the games were a set and that if he could have one the other would be for his brother.
Back home he presented me with the games and let me have first pick and that's how I ended up with Pokémon Blue.
We had a lot of fun playing the game together despite it not having any multiplayer features. Whenever one of us would get to the next town or was ready to challenge a gym we'd wait for the other to catch up. And thanks to the GameLink cable we both managed to complete our Pokedex by the end of it.
Fond memories.
