Persistent storage used to be really expensive, so the Pokemon games have some RAM connected to a little button cell, which was much cheaper to make but when the battery dies your save goes with it. It's not as big of a deal for Gen 1 because they don't use much power, but gen 2 has the clock feature that guzzled the battery. If you have an original cartridge it is definitely dead, I would use an emulator or change the battery if you want to play it again
Wait...the cartridges have batteries in th?
All old cartridge-based games use battery-backed RAM for saves.
In Gold, I think it's for the internal clock
Persistent storage used to be really expensive, so the Pokemon games have some RAM connected to a little button cell, which was much cheaper to make but when the battery dies your save goes with it. It's not as big of a deal for Gen 1 because they don't use much power, but gen 2 has the clock feature that guzzled the battery. If you have an original cartridge it is definitely dead, I would use an emulator or change the battery if you want to play it again