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
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