My first time playing the mainline Pokémon series was on an airplane in 1998. Flying to Minnesota during one of our D track-exclusive months off, I loaded the cherry red cartridge for Pokémon Red into my Gameboy and never looked back.
To a sixth grader with no RPG experience beyond watching Joey vanquish them at sleepovers, the game was tough. I learned basic mechanics in context. When Brock’s rock-type gym proved a gauntlet for my Charmander-led team, for instance, I learned about type advantages. My brother and I had no guidebook or intricate walkthroughs to reference; it was just us and the games.
And those games were hard. My starter choice of Charmander meant I would eventually have a glorious Charizard named Winfield heading my party, but gyms beyond Brock’s (like Misty’s water-based one) owned fire types too, and I kept getting stuck in labyrinthine caves or stymied by the Snorlax blocking my path to progression. I didn’t know the language of the series yet, so I floundered.
But the thrill of finding and catching Pokémon was enough to encourage endurance. I didn’t defeat the Elite Four and champion on that trip, but I did several weeks later during my last trimester of elementary school. Nothing beats my witnessed race through Donkey Kong Country 3 in Irvine as far as video game accomplishments go, but this surely felt bigger to me at the time. I knew platformers, but Pokémon was a whole new adventure.
In the quarter century since that first campaign, I’ve played every mainline Pokémon game from start to completion except for the most recent release, Pokémon Violet, which I’ve started but made minimal progress in. The reasons for that shift aren’t my point here, but my inevitable comfort level with the game mechanics is. Eight generations of cartridges have made me far better at navigating them now than I was at twelve. I understand far more than necessary even: I’m aware of IVs and EVs, STAB is a noun, not a verb, and added gimmicks like Z-moves, Mega Evolution, and Gigantamaxing aren’t intimidating. I’m no expert at this stuff, but I’m fully fluent in it. I can dive right in; I’ll have no trouble when I finally resume Violet someday.
That confidence extends to most players who grew up with the series. Many, in fact, resent that comfort level, denigrating the present iterations as “too easy” to generate thrills. I’m not one of them—I enjoy the familiar flow and find my own ways to enjoy the games at any difficulty—but I do get those complainers’ point. Part of what got them in originally was how it tested them. They crave that same challenge I found in 1998 and the exhilaration that surmounting it delivered.
To instill such thrills anew, players have tinkered with rules to augment the intensity and stakes of their later quests. The most prominent of those adjustments is the Nuzlocke, a modification of the game that ratchets up the difficulty in major ways.
In particular, a Nuzlocke alters how a trainer—the player—interacts with their team of Pokémon. In a normal play-through, Pokémon routinely encounter tough opponents that can’t be immediately defeated. When such a battle occurs, team members often get overwhelmed and run out of HP (hit points), causing them to faint and become unusable. This is inconvenient, but not debilitating: simply take your creatures to the nearest Pokémon Center for free restorative healing back to full strength. This is a cool feature: no matter the stakes, no pocket monster is ever in any real danger.
Nuzlockes do this differently. In a Nuzlocke, the goal is to manufacture difficulty and stakes, so the healing access mechanic gets altered. Pokémon can still be healed, but if one faints in battle, that Pokémon is gone for good. Fainting in a Nuzlocke is effectively death. The Pokémon in question can never be used again. In some rule sets, that Pokémon is wholly released even.
You can see why this would increase the toughness. Pokémon games can be a grind, your team gradually leveling up to gain strength to push through newer and greater obstacles. Losing team members you’ve painstakingly built up undercuts all of that work. One oversight can cost players entire campaigns; one tough battle or one run of RNG misfortune can fell entire thoughtfully-constructed squads. Pull up any Nuzlocke on YouTube or Twitch and you’re bound to hear agony and rage when a moment like this happens.
But Nuzlockes have one extra element that adds to the experience. The interesting thing about this rule is that it alters not the player’s gameplay but their emotional experience: players must give a nickname to every Pokémon they catch.
The reasoning behind this is simple: to undo the lack of danger in a traditional play-through. Winfield the Charmander fainted dozens of times on my first day playing Red; this produced no anxiety because there was always a Nurse Joy to heal him right back up. No defeat was more than temporary. I was never at risk of losing my fire lizard.
In a Nuzlocke though? One poorly-timed critical hit and my best buddy could be gone forever. There is no fainting in a Nuzlocke; a trainer in one holds each Pokémon’s life in their hands during every encounter. And when those creatures have been imbued with affectionate names, losing one means something. The attachment is greater, fuller; every tight battle is harrowing! Losing Winfield in a fit of aggressive carelessness would have crushed me at eleven.
That’s the point. Pokémon games normally offer a fantasy of immortality; a trainer’s animal buddies fight constantly but are never in any actual peril. Nuzlockes flip that script and add a dash of brutal realism to the experience. There’s real pain in the voices of Nuzlockers after rough matches because of that realism. Surviving so many trials together breeds a greater bond that, although destined by the rules to expire, one naively hopes will last through the endgame.
I watched WolfeyVGC’s history of Nuzlockes video1 while baking yesterday, and several clips conveyed just how intense these play-throughs can get. You can almost hear hearts breaking at times: these players have chosen this challenge, but it’s so easy for them to forget that the cute little creature with the cute little name won’t be around forever.
Nuzlockes seem pretty niche, I’ll grant you, but are they? The name might be novel, but the idea is decidedly not.
Anyone who’s ever had a pet knows about Nuzlockes.
*****
Like any kids who watched Lassie, Airbud, and Homeward Bound on repeat for years, my brother and I wanted a dog. We were both allergic to dogs, which made for a bit of a hurdle. We got hamsters instead: Stanley from grade one to grade three, and Snoopy from grade four through grade six.
In seventh grade, we finally won out. Our neighbor, Rosemarie, knew a family that bred golden retrievers. We got to hold all three of our potential puppies not long after they were born when they were scarcely bigger than those hamsters, and we came out several weeks later to choose which would join our family. It didn’t take long: two of them ran around with each other, while one nibbled at our shoelaces and followed us around.
Heidi came home in a shoebox that sat between Tom and me in the back seat of the station wagon. Her apprehension over her entire world being torn apart seemed clear; no amount of stroking with my index finger could fix that. When we sat with her on the grass of our front yard hours later, I worried over whether it had been the right thing to take her, but then I just stared at this tiny little creature and wondered what I was supposed to do with her. In all those years of wanting a dog, I’d never really considered what my life would look like with one in it.
Those allergy issues made her an outdoor dog, and that suited Heidi just fine. Someone came running anytime her tiniest iteration howled at night, and her enclosed area—when she wasn’t climbing out of it—wanted for nothing. We had treated our hamsters to the grandest accommodations of tubes, wheels, and plastic rooms that sprawled over wide shelves, so Heidi got every toy, bed, and Milkbone variation we could find.
It didn’t take long for her to integrate into our family. My mom spent the most time with her, walking her multiple times per day and talking with her any time she was home while we were at school. Heidi listened in earnest to every word. She ran with my dad before his knees were shot, and she’d follow him around the yard, watching intently as he planted flowers or laid stones. I, on the other hand, never quite knew what I was meant to do with her. We’d run around outside sometimes; I carried her when she got tired on walks during those first couple of years. Truth be told: there were times early on when I wasn’t sure if she even liked me.
When I returned from the East Coast trip in eighth grade, though, I climbed out of the van and you’d have thought Heidi won the doggy lottery. She was a bundle of leaping energy; you could see the excitement on her face. I have no idea what it means for dogs to miss someone, whether it’s the Futurama version or not, but damned if that greeting didn’t convince me of something. Fourteen-year-old me couldn’t believe anything could love me that much.
There’s this moment with a pet when they become so fully a part of your life that you don’t even remember there were times when they weren’t. I got used to Heidi’s head popping out from under the garage door and the way her eyes lit up when the van reached the driveway after school. I got used to rubbing her behind the ears when I headed to the bathroom, always straining my bladder long enough for her to start kicking her back leg with satisfaction so that I knew that I’d done it right. I got used to sitting down on the floor next to her after long days and just feeling her breathe, her contentment over my proximity slowing those breaths to a soothing rhythm for both of us.
An outdoor dog at first, Heidi gained ground like a gentle Napoleon. The backyard and garage were hers always, but then she got the laundry room when she wanted it. She annexed the bathroom hallway next, eventually necessitating a plastic child-proof gate after she had fun with some Beanie Babies. When she grew older and moved more slowly, she eventually claimed a spot on the living room carpet, where she would gently creep in and lay down so that we could stroke her while watching a movie. If Dad saw her, she’d scurry back to her kingdom, but even he softened later; he’d tell her a toothless “No” while patting her head watching Star Trek.
Heidi never trained well, her gusto for eating too great to answer only to her own name. She’d let you call her anything you wanted if you had a Pupperoni stick. She loved food, even the occasional carrot, but she got as excited for the rare scrap from our table as a tasteless Milkbone. For all she ate, by the end, I understood it was the attention that accompanied the treats that she really wanted.
Of course, that penchant for eating occasionally got her into trouble. One time she found a condom in the park, excitedly bringing it over to show it off; our Google searches were interesting that day. Other times were less light-hearted: one time she got a stick stuck in her throat. She kept opening her mouth, almost like she was trying to yawn, but the panicked sounds and expressions told us something was wrong. The van barreled down Kammerer at 80 mph en route to Bradshaw Vet. We didn’t get a ticket, and they extricated the stick from a relieved Heidi’s mouth post-haste.
That was the only close call Heidi ever had. Partly that was having every canine medical marvel capitalism could produce, but part of that was also her living a comfortable life. She got regular checkups, she chewed on Dentasticks, she got big but never unathletic—she was a dog with her every need taken care of. Her presence was so natural that it became unremarkable that a fifth entity lived at our house. Neighbors knew her name better than mine; the mail lady would sneak up the driveway to give her head a pet before driving off.
The thing about having a dog, though, is that they age while you age. You hit milestone after milestone growing up, and meanwhile, your dog is there to celebrate. But her milestones are always yours, never her own. Heidi earned no graduation cap; she centered no Quinceañera. She sat in the back of the van with me and Mikey while Tom practiced driving in the Foulks Ranch parking lot, but she earned no license of her own. Her birthday came every August, but only my mom counted the years. Every day of college I arrived home to Heidi’s head poking out from under the garage; every day of student teaching and my first year at school ended that same way. There are a million markers of time’s passage, but I failed to notice it in Heidi’s whiter face or plodding gait.
I got home late from a rare loss during my first year sharing head coaching duties with Bill in 2011. I showered, picked at a lesson plan from the kitchen table, and then thought about going to bed. While the pale blue glow of the TV bathed my sleeping father in light, I unlocked the plastic gate and sat down on the carpet for consolatory snuggling with my dog.
Heidi saw me and lifted her eyebrows. She rose to join me, took two steps, and collapsed in my arms. Her eyes were alert, but I recognized that familiar fear from twelve years prior. Something was wrong. She didn’t whimper or whine; she just sat there, her head leaned into my hands.
We took her to the vet when she wouldn’t even sniff a Milkbone. They found nothing and sent us home, but they said to watch in case she wouldn’t eat the next morning. She did that afternoon but then stopped again. Then she wouldn’t move from her bed. Mom raced to Davis to grab Tom from the dorms; I waited next to Heidi in a lawn chair, hoping she would suddenly pop up, wolf down those uneaten treats, and shed ten years of time’s erosion. She didn’t; Tom and I lifted her bed into the van. We sat with her on the floor, sans seatbelts. We didn’t care.
The first time I visited Bradshaw Vet for a Cub Scout excursion, I got sick from that sanitized smell of chlorine. They’d fed us Double Stuf Oreos on the picnic tables, but that wasn’t enough to put away my feeling of unease there. On this visit, though, I didn’t notice the smell and discovered the people there were literal saints. The calmness and understanding of every single one floors me. You work on animals as a vet and a vet tech, but you work with people. I’m still in awe.
But I wasn’t that night. I, Tom, and a kind tech who leaped right up from his dinner to help carried her bed into a small white room like pallbearers. The guy squeezed my shoulder before leaving when the doctor arrived. We had no more answers for why this was happening than Heidi herself did, but we didn’t need any. The veterinarian explained to our tear-soaked faces what she would do. We offered the grimmest of nods.
When people say things like “The life left their eyes”, they’re telling the truth. Those same eyes that once radiated curiosity as a tiny little thing bounding up to younger versions of us? I watched the life fade from larger versions of them like the injection was a dimmer switch between life and death, every ounce of affection they carried slowly shrinking to a single point until it disappeared. I swear she maintained eye contact until that vanishing point; I think she wanted her last images to be us.
They gave us some time with her body. It was kind to let us run our fingers along the fur of what had been this iconoclastic member of our family one more time, even though those few minutes were nothing compared to the dozen years we’d shared. Her body still retaining a tiny bit of its prior warmth, I held her lifeless ear and kissed the top of her snout. Her nose was already bone dry.
I felt like my eyes would never be again.
*****
When attempting a Nuzlocke, players must demonstrate intense focus and foresight. Any battle taken lightly can be the last one. Bad luck can end even a previously pristine run. Show anything less than the utmost care and a treasured team member can faint forever.
Dogs are more durable than a level 13 Nidoran, of course—especially because only the cruelest among us pit them in battles. Having a dog teaches a similar responsibility, though. To have a dog is to take charge of another life. No dog is ordering bags of food directly from Petco.com itself. They need us from the beginning until the end.
Just as a Nuzlocke teaches trainers to approach previously trivial encounters with due diligence, so too do dogs teach us. You have to factor in their needs alongside your own. You’ve got to consider every element of what it takes to care for a dog; they have to be accounted for in every plan you make. Nuzlockes in Pokémon games beget mastery of mechanics; the Nuzlockes we undertake with our pets teach us empathy and awareness.
The reward for completing a Nuzlocke is the thrill of having transformed a friendly game into a formidable foe and beating it anyway, thrilling in every arduous step along the way. The reward for completing a real-life Nuzlocke is never that: it’s one final lesson for the road.
Maybe it’s a coincidence that the lifespan of a dog matches the rough length of adolescence, but I choose to believe it’s less evolution than grace. A dog teaches a child, a teen, or a young adult, skills they need to navigate the world. Dogs accompany us through tough transitions; they offer absolutely nothing but compulsive affection. We are benevolent gods to the family dog, who worships at our feet not with prayer but with unbridled, unwavering love. And then, at the end, they teach us one final lesson: how to say goodbye. They teach us to look beyond our selfish desires and act in the best interests of another, or they teach us that life is short, precious, and full of meaning when they are snapped from ours too soon. That’s the thing about a dog: from the moment one is born to the moment one arrives in doggy heaven, they live for us. What a responsibility.
In some ways, I envy the Pokémon Nuzlockers. While their anguish might be real after a critical hit ends their starter’s journey, the conclusion of their time together always yields more Pokémon and more games; even the most crippling error gets undone in moments with a new save file. It isn’t that way in real life: it’s not video game heartbreak but the genuine article.
I remember arriving home after a game in Davis and being puzzled at the absence of a certain face watching for me from under the garage. It took a moment before I remembered that Heidi was gone, that I’d never again come home to her shaking with joy to see me like my presence was the greatest gift she’d ever received. What a thing it is to matter that much to something, to center the entire existence of another living thing! Pulling the parking brake, I slumped down in my chair and cried.
My Twitch subscriptions include no Nuzlockers, so I don’t know whether those lost team members get remembered or not. I’d bet some do, becoming perpetual memes for future runs where the chat spams the name of a fallen Fearow like some sort of memorial chant. But I suspect this is really where the Pokémon and real-world Nuzlockes diverge.
I can’t believe those players still think deeply about that Luvdisc they released on Emerald Kaizo. There’s no way they still feel an ache in their heart for the Alakazam that gave its final HP to escape dire straits versus Cynthia.
Unlike me. Some nights, I get sufficient sleep to dream. Every year, on one or two of those nights, a certain dog appears in my dreams. Sometimes it’s a specific moment we had together—a trip in the car, a long walk, a case of the zoomies—but most of the time we just vaguely exist in this timeless gray world of shadows. I’m always sitting in these dreams, and Heidi always puts her head in my lap and lets me hold her like I used to. She feels warm. I wake up crying every time—every single time—but there’s that moment right before I realize it was a dream where I don’t and, for a few glorious seconds, I think that Heidi is downstairs waiting to leap with joy at the very sight of me. It’s been twelve years—an entire doggy lifetime!—and from a new house, I still have that dream and still feel both the impossible joy and guttural anguish of being loved by our dog. I hope that crushing dream never stops finding me. The sobbing hurt and damp pillow are worth even a millisecond of feeling like Heidi is still here, dying to love me again.
That’s a Nuzlocke, folks.
That’s a Nuzlocke.
This wasn’t a piece I intended to write. It just found me. This may not strike you as moving, but I assure you that it wallops me all these years later.
If you once loved and lost a dog, I hope this piece makes you think about them. That’s all.