Pokémon

• 1. Introduction

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  Pokémon began as the private obsession of a boy in Machida, a suburb of Tokyo, who spent his childhood catching insects in the ponds and fields around his town. When Japan's economic boom swallowed those fields under concrete, Satoshi Tajiri carried the memory of that lost world into adulthood. What he eventually built from it became, by most estimates, the highest-grossing media franchise in history. Over 489 million video game units sold. Over 75 billion trading cards printed. A single mobile game that earned more than $440 million in its first 90 days. And at the center of it all, a yellow mouse-like creature named Pikachu, whose appeal, Tajiri's team once predicted, would reach both boys and girls and their mothers alike. How did a game conceived on a seven-year-old handheld console become a permanent fixture of global culture? The answer runs through childhood nostalgia, a link cable, a lucky friendship, and a media frenzy that burned so hot it nearly broke under its own heat.

• 2. The Boy Behind the Game

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  Satoshi Tajiri was born on the 28th of August 1965 and spent his early years exploring the nature surrounding Machida. The town's rapid expansion during Japan's economic miracle paved over the ponds and fields where he once hunted insects. By junior high, he had traded bug-catching for the arcade machines that were beginning to appear in his neighborhood. While studying electrical engineering, he launched a self-published doujinshi magazine called Game Freak, its name inspired by the 1932 film Freaks. The first issue appeared in March 1983, when Tajiri was 17. At a time when specialist video game publications did not yet exist in Japan, the magazine filled an empty shelf. Through it, Tajiri connected with aspiring manga artist Ken Sugimori, who became his illustrator, and eventually with Tsunekazu Ishihara, a businessman who produced game-related programming for Fuji Television. In 1986, Tajiri, Sugimori, and several others converted their informal enthusiasm into a small development team, keeping the Game Freak name. Their first finished product, the puzzle game Quinty, was published by Namco in 1989. Tajiri formally incorporated Game Freak Co., Ltd. on the 26th of April 1989, the same year he began thinking about what would become Pocket Monsters.

• 3. From Capsules to Cartridges

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  The specific spark for Pocket Monsters came from two directions at once. Nintendo announced the Game Boy, a portable console with a link port that allowed two devices to be connected by cable. Around the same time, Tajiri recalled playing Dragon Quest II for the Famicom and noticing that Ken Sugimori had encountered two copies of an extremely rare in-game item called Mysterious Hat, while Tajiri had found none. The cable, he realized, meant players could now transfer things between cartridges rather than simply compete. Combining that insight with his childhood habit of collecting small creatures, Tajiri described his concept as a virtual recreation of his boyhood experiences and an attempt to "regain the world that he had lost". He later called the game "the story of a boy's summer day". The mechanics of catching and storing creatures were influenced by Ultraseven, a tokusatsu series in which the titular hero carries miniaturized monsters in capsules that expand when thrown into the air. Tajiri initially called his project Capsule Monsters, shortened internally to Capumon, before learning the phrase could not be trademarked. The game became Pocket Monsters. Development officially began after Tajiri pitched the idea at the Kanda-Sudachō offices of Ape Inc. in Tokyo, where Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, upon hearing the concept, reportedly said: "This is it. This is the idea I've been waiting for." A development contract was signed at the start of 1990, though the game would not reach stores for another six years.

• 4. Six Years in Development

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  The budget Nintendo allocated to Game Freak was low, and Pocket Monsters was planned as a small, compact game. As the team's ambitions grew, development stalled. After an active phase in 1990 and 1991, the project was suspended indefinitely while the studio worked on other titles. Progress resumed seriously only in the summer of 1994, following the release of Pulseman, when Tajiri decided it was time to push through to completion. By that point the team had grown. Among the newer staff was graphic artist Atsuko Nishida, who created Pikachu. Ishihara applied his knowledge of card games to deepen the battle system and introduced the concept of Pokémon types. He also originated the idea of the Pokédex, the in-game device players use to catalog the creatures they catch. On Shigeru Miyamoto's suggestion, the game was split into two versions, Red and Green, each containing Pokémon not found in the other, specifically to encourage players to trade. Ishihara founded Creatures, Inc. on the 8th of November 1995, and co-ownership of the Pokémon property was assigned to that new firm. This created an unusual three-way ownership structure shared by Game Freak, Creatures, and Nintendo. Journalist Kenji Hatakeyama later noted that Pokémon is "probably the only property in the world today for which the original rights are not concentrated in a single company". Tajiri was offered a merger with Creatures but declined, saying: "If Game Freak ceased to exist, then so would I." Pocket Monsters Red and Green were finally released on the Game Boy on the 27th of February 1996.

• 5. Slow Burn, Then Fire

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  Nintendo had no high expectations for the games. The Game Boy was seven years old by 1996, considered dated and near the end of its lifecycle. Media coverage was sparse. What changed the trajectory was a calculated promotional move tied to CoroCoro Comic, a monthly manga magazine published by Shogakukan that was read by one in four Japanese elementary school students. The May 1996 issue, released on the 15th of April, announced the Legendary Pokémon Offer: readers could enter a lottery to win a Mew, a secret Pokémon deliberately made unobtainable through normal play. Only 20 winners were selected. Each had to mail in their cartridge to have Mew uploaded onto it. The promotion spread word of mouth rapidly, and by September, sales of Red and Green had passed one million units. The trading card game launched on the 20th of October 1996. It was designed partly by Ishihara and three colleagues who had all previously worked on EarthBound (1994) at Ape Inc. Despite being ignored by most media, the cards became an immediate success. The anime, produced by OLM, Inc. under director Kunihiko Yuyama, premiered on the 1st of April 1997. A production council involving Ishihara, Sugimori, Yuyama, and independent producer Yoshikawa decided every major creative detail, from the general storyline to the question of whether Pokémon could speak. They unanimously agreed Pikachu should be a central icon, and cast Ikue Otani in the role. By November 1997, Pocket Monsters had become the highest-rated program on TV Tokyo.

• 6. A Crisis and Its Aftermath

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  On the evening of the 16th of December 1997, the 38th episode of the anime, "Dennō Senshi Porygon", was watched by approximately 4.6 million households. The episode included a sequence of rapidly alternating red and blue flashes that triggered adverse health effects in more than 10,000 viewers, including headaches, dizziness, nausea, and in some cases photosensitive epileptic seizures. Hundreds of children were taken to hospitals. Broadcasting of the anime was halted immediately, and new industry guidelines were introduced. During the hiatus, the film Pocket Monsters the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back was completed; its script had already been written and storyboards were underway when the incident occurred. The anime returned on the 16th of April 1998, and the film premiered on the 18th of July 1998, becoming the fourth highest-grossing film of the year in Japan. In an outcome that surprised many observers, the incident did not diminish the franchise. Pokémon products continued to sell normally through the hiatus, and businesses generally understood that the anime had been suspended rather than canceled. The crisis, if anything, demonstrated how deeply embedded the franchise had become in Japanese commercial life.

• 7. Pokémania Goes Global

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  Minoru Arakawa, founder and then-president of Nintendo of America, first encountered Pokémon at Shoshinkai 1996 in late November of that year. He returned to the United States with cartridges and found that his own employees did not believe the game would work there. Role-playing games were not popular with American audiences at the time, and internal research suggested that US children lacked the patience for them. There was also a concern that Pokémon was too kawaii, or cute, to succeed without a visual overhaul. Test designs were commissioned that included more muscular Pokémon and a redesigned Pikachu described internally as resembling "a tiger with huge breasts". Arakawa concluded the redesign "didn't work". The pivotal figure in the international launch was Alfred R. Kahn, CEO of 4Kids Entertainment. Kahn agreed to invest an undisclosed amount in exchange for both the anime and licensing rights, and he proposed the acute accent in "Pokémon" to assist English speakers with pronunciation and, as he put it, "give it a little flair". NoA allocated a launch budget reportedly equal to or exceeding $50 million, roughly the same amount spent on the 1985 North American launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Arakawa told colleagues that if Pokémon succeeded as well in the US as it had in Japan, "an investment of 1 would turn into 100". The anime reached American airwaves on the 7th of September 1998. Pokémon Red Version and Blue Version followed three weeks later, on the 28th of September 1998. By December, the anime had become the highest-rated syndicated children's show on weekday television. A bidding war between Warner Bros. and Saban Entertainment for broadcast rights ended with Warner Bros. winning. The premiere on Kids' WB on the 13th of February 1999 became the most watched debut in the channel's history.

• 8. Fad, Backlash, and Legacy

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  By April 1999, journalists at Time and USA Today were calling the phenomenon "Pokémania". A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article from the 3rd of August 1999 quoted a Toys "R" Us manager saying that 600 booster packs would sell out within 24 hours. A Wizards of the Coast spokeswoman told The Washington Post that the company had "exhausted most of the card-printing capacity of the United States". USA Today reported in November 1999 that factories producing Hasbro's Pokémon toys had expanded output by 20 times while still failing to meet demand. Nintendo saw a 250% increase in profits in 1999 compared to the prior year, with Pokémon accounting for over 30% of the company's revenue. Scholars David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green later wrote that Nintendo "could be argued" to have struggled to survive without it. 4Kids Entertainment, initially a little-known firm, expanded to 30 times its previous revenues and was named the fastest-growing company in America by Fortune magazine in September 2000. The backlash was proportional to the fever. Cards were "almost universally banned" from school grounds in the US, with similar bans in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and European countries. In September 1999, US law firm Milberg filed a class-action lawsuit arguing that booster packs constituted a form of lottery. Pokémon: The First Movie premiered in North America on the 12th of November 1999; it was a box-office success and one of the most successful Japanese animated films of all time, even as many Western critics dismissed it. By 2002, Pokémania was over. Yet Pokémon never left. Anne Allison's research found that American children who knew Pokémon often knew where it came from, and many told her that the franchise had made them want to study Japanese and visit Japan. Pioneer anime importer John Ledford noted that Pokémon underscored the commercial potential of anime as a business category. The importing of Yu-Gi-Oh!, Digimon, and Monster Rancher were all confirmed by executives to have been partly inspired by Pokémon's success. In 2016, Pokémon Go generated more than $440 million in worldwide revenue by the end of July alone, and became the fastest mobile game ever to reach $600 million, doing so in 90 days. On the 27th of February 2026, the franchise's 30th anniversary, the first Generation X games, Pokémon Winds and Waves, were announced for release in 2027, with 1,025 Pokémon species now in the roster and no sign that the inventory of the world is finished yet.