YouTuber proves you can catch 40 Pokémon before the SS Anne in Gen One, but can your rival? (2024)

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The first generation of Pokémon games have an absurd amount of fan theory, interpreted lore, and Mandela Effect myths spurned off them. One of the most prevalent of those is the idea that your rival can’t have captured over 40 Pokémon by the time you encounter them for the third time, this time on the SS Anne.

At this point in the game, you’ve only just beaten Misty, and you’ve likely only caught between 10-15 Pokémon yourself. How then, does your spiky-haired rival claim to have caught over 40? As a youngster, I always thought that part of the challenge posed by your rival was that their Pokémon always felt unfair. His Rattatta evolves into a Raticate early at level 16 instead of 20, and when you fight him in Lavender Town, he has an Exeggcute that is only available later from the Safari Zone. The Exeggcute can be explained as it’s not out of the question that your rival is trading with other trainers, though the Raticate does raise some strange questions.

I’m going to don my wildest conspiracy theorist hat for a second here. One of the most popular fan theories from the Gen One games is that you kill your rival’s Raticate on the SS Anne. That’s why you meet him ‘mourning’ in the Pokémon Tower. Part of me thinks that the reason that the Raticate is so weak is that it is the result of Team Rocket’s experimentation, leading to a premature evolution, and an untimely death. Perhaps your rival unknowingly traded with a Team Rocket Grunt, or hell, he even purchased the Pokémon willingly.

Anyway, your rival claiming that he has over 40 Pokémon does unwind this theory slightly. Instead of the Raticate dying, it’s more than likely the case that he simply thought it was too weak for his team and swapped it out for something else entirely. This sounds pretty on-brand for your rival, even though he’s actually a little sweetie at his core.

I think I’ve set the stage enough to explain why exactly I’m interested in the fact that it’s actually possible for your rival to have captured 40 Pokémon at this stage. While it doesn’t really change anything, it still kind of does: it almost entirely changes my image of the original buggy, broken, unpolished, and illogical games to something else – buggy, broken, unpolished, and only slightly illogical. Now, don’t get me wrong – I like all of these features. And they make the games for me.

Popular Pokémon YouTuber, Jrose11, is the content creator most recently responsible for proving if it was even possible to catch 40 Pokémon by this point in the game. As expected, the choice of starter Pokémon does not really matter, since you can’t get any others without trading.

The thing is, there’s not a hard set of rules that defines whether or not some of these Pokémon fall into the category of the 40 that your rival has caught. Since an evolution from – for example – a Ratatta to a Raticate does indeed fill in the Pokédex, we can assume that evolution does count. However, there are some Pokémon that can only be evolved to the next stage after surpassing the highest level of your rival’s team, which suggests that it’s unlikely that he’s even evolved them that far. At least, that is, if your rival doesn’t have some sort of way to evolve Pokémon early, or a way to receive Pokémon that have evolved early from a third-party organisation. Say, Team Rocket…

If you cap your Pokémon to level 20, and you decide he can’t use the in-game trades since you’ve already used them, you’re going to only have 36 different Pokémon registered in your Pokédex. However, if you are a little looser with your ‘catching’ it’s entirely possible.

It’s not even a question of whether or not you can catch more than 40 Pokémon by the time you challenge your rival aboard the SS Anne. The real question is whether or not it’s possible and logical for your rival to do so.