Why you should care about Pokémon Gold and Silver for 3DS

Pokémon Gold and Silver are the best games in the 20-year-old series. And we’ll now be able to play them without busting out our ancient Nintendo portable systems.

While Pokkén Tournament coming to the Switch and Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon for the 3DS might have been the flashier announcements to come out of Nintendo’s Direct stream today, we also learned that the original versions of Pokémon Gold and Silver are coming to the 3DS via the system’s digital store for older games, the Virtual Console. For Pokémon fans, this is great news. Gold and Silver first came out for the Game Boy Color in 1999 in Japan and 2000 in the U.S. These are the best games the series has ever seen, and this is the first time in nearly 20 years that people will be able to play them in their original forms without jumping through retro hoops. They were also big financial hits, selling over 23 million copies.