Pokémon
Videogame? Trading Card Game? Catch 'em all!
Pokémania keeps going strong. My “Friendly Local Game Store” that I visited most weeks for nearly twenty years no longer has a board game group …. because the Pokémon league is much bigger1. We’ve been squeezed out.
And my board gaming night was hardly the first casualty to fall to the Pokémon horde. How many videogames went un-played and unbought as people tried to catch ‘em all?
Satoshi Tajiri’s Pokémon video games took the world by storm, aided by the vastly influential anime. Mickey Mouse? Star Wars? Pokémon is worth more than them combined. You need to add the MCU to finally surpass the yellow electric mouse’s worth2. In this century, Pokémon Go had One. Billion. Downloads.
I’ve never played it … but the video game seems age appropriate. Tajira dictated that losing pokémon ‘went to sleep’ instead of died, and similar decisions. I’ve seen it played on twitch’s ‘Claude Plays Pokémon’ stream where the LLM was tasked (and failed) at beating the video game. I think my children played back in the day — the annoying sounds seem vaguely familiar.
But I know they loved the card game.
Tsunekazu Ishihara and Takumi Akabane’s3 Pokémon Trading Card Game mixed the franchise with Magic the Gathering to create a Collectable Card Game, but one simple enough for your children. In particular, many attacks involve flipping a coin for the result. The most geeked-out min-maxed deck could lose to a spunky little kid with a heart of gold and a little luck … which is the entire point of Pokémon.
My kids loved the CCG, but more for the collectability and looking at the cards. But now, nearly thirty years later there are still new video games being made and boardgamers being evicted to make way for a bigger group playing the CCG.
Not every gamer enjoys Pokémon, but it’s still doing its best to catch us all. I cannot speak to the Videogame, but I think there’s a decent argument that both the Videogame series and the CCG are candidates for inclusion into The 100 Most Influential Games of the 20th Century. But there is also an argument that as games both are fairly derivative (particularly the CCG). What do you think?
And undoubtedly much more profitable
According to Wikipedia’s list of Highest Grossing Media Franchises, which admittedly can’t include theme park revenue.
Wikipedia also lists Kouichi Ooyama as a designer, but BGG credits him as an artist.
A coworker at the first height of Pokemon buzz recounted the story of his awkward nerdy kids getting really excited about Pokemon, and taking their Gameboys to a tournament at a mall. They stood in line for two hours, paid $30 a piece to enter the tournament, and once they downloaded the "special" digital asset Pokemon onto their cartridges they told their dad "OK, we're ready to go now"...