Squirtle, I (Should) Choose You! Settling a Great Pokémon Debate with Science

In the fall of 1998 I stole a Pokémon trading card in Shanghai, China. It was a Kadabra, I remember now. It was slipped discretely from a child’s backpack and into my pocket. He noticed an hour or so later. I was discovered and interrogated, but I eventually lied my way out of it. The Kadabra was placed into a plastic binder filled with other cards, some “shiny”, some not. It was wrong to do, I know now, but at the time I didn’t care. I was nine-years old and I had to catch them all. The first introduction to my future Pokémon obsession was to Pokémon Red/Blue when the games first came out for Nintendo’s GameBoy. Thanks to a timer attached to each play-through, I know that I have since spent full days training and battling in those virtual worlds. I had the games, I had the cards, I had the trading cables (the most genius/evil marketing scheme ever unleashed on a nine-year old). I was in China when Pokémon fever hit and I got it bad. But as I got older, I didn’t stay with it. My binder full of rares has since disappeared. I have refused to play the other games like the newest Pokémon X/Y out of some misplaced hipster angst. I have moved on from wanting to be the very best, like no one ever was. But no matter what my relationship to Pokémon is now, I can’t deny that it was one of the driving forces in my nerdy life. And like any fanboy or girl who has ever played the original games, Pokémon was singular in that it provided me the first life-altering choice in my young life: Which of the starting Pokémon—Squirtle, Charmander, or Bulbasaur—should I pick? It felt like a digital “Sophie’s Choice,” with any decision rendering two Pokémon forever un-catchable, destined to be used against me by my rival. So, for all the nerds who have forever wondered, for all the kids who will second-guess themselves for the rest of their lives, it’s time to direct the same dedication that drove me to steal a trading card towards answering the question once and for all, with science. You Teach Me and I’ll Teach You Recently, one of my favorite computing services—the amazingly useful WolframAlpha—decided to add the stats, pictures, and descriptions of over 600 Pokémon to its database. With so much data now at anyone’s disposal, it’s the perfect time to settle the age-old starting Pokémon question. But first, it might be interesting to see how Pokémon, from a data perspective, has changed since I first played back when the original games debuted. Using WolframAlpha’s data, I plotted the average (median) statistics for all Pokémon over the last five “generations” (everything up to the latest releases, X/Y):