The Ballad of the Bootleg “Pokémon Diamond” Cartridge
All work and no play makes Marc a dull boy.
Around 2002 or so, being a Malay kid living in America while my grandma was in Borneo, I took a trip to Malaysia. I bought a ton of bootleg Pokémon stuff in Kuching — I vividly remember using Squirtle and Charmander toothpaste, hahah. The most important and genuinely life-changing thing I picked up while there, however, was an enigmatic cartridge for a game referred to as “Pokémon Diamond Version.” Here is a bit of background information on it and some pics of the infamous cartridge.
What’s All the Hoopla?
“Pokémon Diamond” — not the Nintendo DS Pokémon game released alongside “Pokémon Pearl” in 2007, but a Game Boy Color cartridge bootlegged in the early 2000’s — isn’t a Pokémon game. Sure, it has the key elements of amassing a collection of monster friends that you train to later pit against other monsters to beat the pulp and SIM cards out of each other, but so do the DS Digimon RPGs and many other games that are noticeably not Pokémon. It turns out that this is a small but distinct genre of video game called “mon[ster] games” or “mongames,” not just something only Pokémon does. Being a gullible child, I never noticed this; I was young, naïve, an excited gamer, and unable to understand the bit-crushed voice on the title screen: “Keitai Denjuu Terefangu!”
Yes, despite the box art that shows nothing but Pokémon (and the mysterious snake creature on the cart), “Pokémon Diamond” was just a game in the same genre, bootlegged as a Pokémon game to coast off its popularity. The game hidden underneath all the machine-translated gibberish and profanity was Keitai Denjuu Telefang, a mongame flavored strongly of early 2000’s mobile phones and curry instead of Poké Balls and Pokéblocks — though now that Pokémon Sword and Shield, over twenty years later, genuinely have cell phones and curry in them, this distinction is much less pronounced than it used to be.
The basic premise of the game is that you are a human who, upon answering a (literal) call to action, is whisked to another world where these monsters called “denjuu” need your help fighting against the ecological nightmare of their world’s antenna trees going extinct. It’s an admittedly silly premise until a few seconds later in the script when it’s revealed thet they come from these trees and losing them would result in denjuu going extinct entirely, or half an hour or so later when it sinks in that a corrupt pharmaceutical company is trying to inject itself into the denjuus’ world to do whatever the hell they want to do to the antenna trees and the largely unspoiled natural world around it.
There is far more to Telefang than just my (questionably correct) ten-minute summary, however, and the folks at Tulunk Village can attest to it. I could drone on and I still wouldn’t be able to do it justice like they've done — including a proper English translation! Call me crazy, though, but I prefer the wildly outlandish script of the bootleg, ahah. Maybe it’s nostalgia, maybe it’s just a stubborn desire to stick with what I know than to change, or maybe it’s just that I’ve been told time and time again: “Shit! Remember it!”
The Cart Itself
The cartridge casing is translucent green plastic with silver glitter in it. I had always thought that the fact that it didn’t match the color of a diamond was weird — until I discovered that it was a bootleg cartridge of Keitai Denjuu Telefang, of course. However, I hadn’t noticed the absence of the official Nintendo seal of quality on the cartridge until the day I took these pictures.
In the second image, you can see the contact points through the cartridge! I had always thought that that was the coolest thing ever. Too bad translucent plastic casings for electronics became unfashionable and basically went extinct 20 years ago...
The top of the cartridge just says “GAME” on it. Since this is technically the only Game Boy Color game I own, I hadn’t given it a second thought until I’d taken these photos.
Wrapping up with the front side of the cartridge, the sticker wasn't placed too accurately on it. Image four’s top left and right show it well: it’s raised a bit all the way through the top of the sticker, but it’s most noticeable there. Again, since this was the only Game Boy Color game I’d ever owned, the “Only for Game Boy Color” corner never came off to me as strange. Ah, you foolish bootleggers, “Only for Game Boy Color,” my butt. I played this exclusively on a Game Boy Advance SP. Take that! I’ve ascended beyond the limitations of your graphic design.
Moving on to the back side, a long, horizontal crack trails across the back of the casing, but for the life of me, I can't remember if that was something I did or if it was already there when I bought it (though I doubt that a department store would have sold something obviously damaged like this). The internal circuitry on the back is also visible from within, and it is the coolest thing ever.
There is an inventory sticker of some sort on the back, and a screw has been exposed underneath it through wear. I redrew it on the left of image six for clarity; 01 and 8 are marked on it. The sticker itself is flaky but adhesive. The only reason why it looks like it’s been peeling off is because I consciously tried to do that years ago, annoyed with the unecessary stickerings of packages and products.
Finally, I should mention that upside-down and diagonally-tilted on the back of the cartridge is the string “KD075.” I can’t tell if it’s printed on the inside of the plastic casing or directly onto the circuit board, but neither hypothesis makes sense to me.
The Aftermath
At times I look back and recall that I also had the opportunity to buy Jade version, but I didn’t. I regret it frequently. I also bought a bootleg Digimon game, but it was a gift for someone else. Maybe one day, I’ll get a hold of him to get some pics of that, too.
Even to this day, the awful translations and laughably incoherent script have had a lasting effect on my humor and my understanding of the Japanese language. Most importantly? Well, thanks to Telefang, I have had curry.