Technically speaking, anyone who has played Pokémon Gold and Silver, or their remakes, has probably caught at least one shiny. In those games, you catch a red Gyarados as part of the mainline story. But outside this special Gyarados, catching a shiny proved to be difficult in earlier generations. From the second generation through gen 5 (Pokémon Black 2 and White 2), the rate of seeing a shiny was even lower than it is now — 1 in 8,192.

Of course, each game led players to develop their own tricks and strategies for getting shiny Pokémon. In Gold and Silver, some shiny hunters estimated that a player could achieve a 1 in 64 chance of hatching a shiny if one of the parent Pokémon is shiny. However, that requires starting with a shiny, so those who want something other than Gyarados are left to grind and get one in the wild. So getting started catching one in the wild still required an enormous amount of grinding as players bore through the low odds. In the early days, items that boosted the appearance rates of shiny Pokémon didn’t exist, so if you didn’t breed you would have to cycle through encounter after encounter in the Pokemon scarlet.