Pokemon gengar

Every Pokémon fan has one game that they love so much that they keep playing it again and again until they've lost count. For me, it has to be FireRed. It was the first game I ever played, and so I love it quite a lot. A couple of days ago, I had the feeling to play Pokemon FireRed again, but I didn't want to overwrite my most recent FireRed save file as I had lots of shinies in that game and didn't have a DS or a second Gameboy Advance to transfer them to, so I decided to download an emulator from the internet as well as a copy of FireRed. At the beginning the game was pretty normal, with Prof. Oak asking me stuff and all, but when I exited my home, I noticed that Pallet town was a lot different then it was supposed to be. There were a lot of extra houses around, and the title bar read Black Town, not Pallet Town.

This is a ROM hack, I thought. But the site from which I downloaded it said FireRed. ROM hack or not, I was very curious as to know what would happen next. I went up to Route 1, and like the original FireRed, Prof. Oak approached me, walked me to his lab, then asked me to choose a Pokémon. I chose Squirtle, but to my amazement and horror, the Squirtle’s eyes were black. I chose it nonetheless. During the the battle with my rival I noticed his Bulbasaur had black eyes too. The Bulbasaur's cry sounded glitchy, and my Squirtle's cry didn't sound out at all.

After the battle, I went outside, and tried going into some of the new houses. Most of the houses were locked, but one was open. I entered it, and a box in the top left read, 'Ghost Town'. There were many different buildings there, even a Pokémon Center, Poké-Mart and a Gym. There were many people too, but they didn't respond when I tried talking to them.

None of the houses were open, except one. I entered it.

There were stairs going up, I went up them, and entered a very hazy room with tiles of grass. I went up one step and immediately encountered a lvl 33 Gengar.

Since I only had a lvl 6 Squirtle, it was no surprise I had immediately lost to that Gengar. After that, instead of showing the usual "RED scurried to a Pokemon Center" screen, it instead showed a completely black screen. After a while, a dialog box appeared with the following text rolled out:

"You are a bad trainer. You did not take care of your Squirtle. He suffered because of you. You did not treat him with love and care. GAME OVER."

After that, the game crashed.

When I turned the game back on, it said that the save file has been deleted (despite the fact that I never saved the game) and crashed again. I deleted the game and put my laptop away.

I wonder what I did wrong to my Squirtle. Up to that point, he had lost no battle. Maybe the fact that I didn't nickname him? And why were his eyes black? Does that mean he had no eyes? Was it a birth defect? I don't know, but maybe someday some other guy who plays that game will figure it out. Maybe it'll be you!