Man, the first pokemon I played, was also blue and I remember it was from a friend, but the game had a pretty serious problem: it didn't save the game, once I turned off the gameboy all the progress was erased, so I had to start again every day. Every day I started again trying to get as far as possible, I spent hours and hours playing to get to the end of the Pokémon League. What memories hahah
Oh man that sounds like a nightmare :( it took a long time to get to the pokemon league as well unless you just went full 1 pokemon only. I think there are some speedruns that just use nidoking throughout all of it to finish the game in 3h or so.