Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit

I loved gen 1 pokemon as a kid in the 90s. But today I sometimes feel like our culture is locked in time. Walking into a toy store is somewhat depressing - everything looks exactly the same as it did when I was a kid! It’s been 30+ years, kids should have way cooler toys and IPs.

Rant incoming...

My wife and I live near a park. When we go on walks, we see people who have driven to the park, where they drive slowly around the parking lot, frequently stopping and starting, cars running the whole time. Rarely do they get out of their car. They are, I believe, playing Pokemon Go. Yesterday there were over 2 dozen cars driving around. Nobody was walking. They don't talk to anybody. They are like zombies. I don't get it. Yesterday I did see one dad with his kid, and they were out actually walking on the trails. I can understand that. But driving to the park to drive around?! Argh!

end rant. Thanks for listening.

Its interesting that elementary kids have this kind of evergreen introduction to Pokemon. There is always a new set of games coming out, cards to buy, toys, anime. So kids see older kids with it, they want to get it, then they get introduced. So this "fad" has gone on for 30 years.

However, even as someone who plays JRPGs. I can't for the life of me understand how adults are playing the games. The pokemon games are painful games to play, full of grinding, massive amounts of rng and just boring turn based combat (compared to other rpgs that exist). Why as an adult you would play Pokemon over SMT is something I can't get. Every time Ive tried ive bounced off newer games hard.

Last weekend I vibe-coded a website where my boys (5 and 8 years old) can look up their Pokémon cards to find out what they mean.

They can read Dutch but they have cards with English & Portugese texts. Site helps them learning English :-)

https://kartiq.xyz/en

I never played any Pokémon game apart from Go, until I recently tried HG/SS on my phone. It was a joy to experience (mobile!) games in an era where they were made as a form of art instead of as a cheap money making scheme. No microtransactions, no mandatory grind to progress, but plenty of goals and side quests to try as you want.

It is one of the few franchises that spans generations. My kids enjoy it, just as my wife and I enjoyed it before them. We have fun playing the games together. I imagine my parents felt the same way with Star Wars.

I grew up playing the games, and still have my copy of Yellow and Red. I fell of the wagon somewhere around Gen VI, the games just got to easy. It became clear to me that Gamefreak was just throwing in the towel and gave up making interesting games.

That being said, recently I started getting into the world of Romhacks and they have sparked new joy in me. The games are hard, fun, and have a lot of love poured into them. I'm going through Radical Red right now, and its been an incredible time.

As a kid, I had the original Pokemon Blue for the GBC. Played it, enjoyed it, found it novel, beat it. Went to an event, got an authentic Mew (certificate is still around somewhere).

Not long after, I was gifted Pokemon Silver. Played a bit of it. Didn't find it novel anymore. Very rapidly had this feeling of "I see where this is going and I want off this ride". Gave up on Pokemon, and haven't regretted it even slightly.

I know there have been many innovations in the mechanics since (e.g. double battles), and I realize the game has a very large amount of strategy. But it also felt like the same kind of feeling I get from games like MtG ("expensive cardboard"); that also has a lot of depth and strategy and new mechanics, but the "collection" aspect feels painful in an "I can see the Skinner box" way, in ways many other games don't.

I had a similar feeling a few years later, when I played Wind Waker for the first time. That was one of the first games I intentionally decided not to 100%: specifically, I left out the picture gallery, which gave me the same "collectathon" feeling.

If you want to drop $8k or so you can buy a Pokemon pinball game from Stern: https://sternpinball.com/game/pokemon/ .

Love Pokemon, hate the whole unregulated illegal gambling part of it and how they pray on kids. It’s the dark side of Nintendo. And of course the stories like this https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2025-08-13/mcd...

Honestly TCGs like Pokemon, YuGiOh, and Magic should have been regulated long long time ago but we have 100 years of history with baseball cards too so nothing going to happen.

I still do a double-take when I see Pokémon trading card game vending machines at the grocery store.

I am an elder Millennial with no kids…I knew it was still a popular game, but seeing a great big Pokéball machine next to the shopping carts really drove it home.

It was a labor of love originally.

I just bought a controller attachment for my smartphone so I can replay Crystal and Emerald! I haven't tried any of the 3D games yet, do they still hold some of the charm that the 2D games had?

Its the ultimate millennial throwback.

It's just a fad

Here's a little story I read about how Pokemon's story intertwined with the rest of the fantasy gaming universe:

You might have heard of another fantasy card game called Magic: The Gathering, started in the early 1990s by a small company called Wizards of the Coast which Wikipedia says was named after something in the founders' personal RPG world. MTG took off and WOTC did very well.

In April 1997, apparently with cash to burn, WOTC invested in a bit of nostalgia, acquiring a dying gaming company called TSR which made a game called Dungeons & Dragons. D&D had peaked in the early 1980s and was then steadily run into the ground by two owners. WOTC's investment didn't do much for over a decade, iirc (becoming so desperate that Hasbro (see below) management embraced an employee's idea for 'open source gaming').

The same year WOTC continued their speculative investments, acquiring the US (or English language?) license to a Japanese fantasy card game called Pokemon. This one was a hit.

Two years later Hasbro acquired WOTC. The story said that Hasbro wanted the Pokemon license and maybe MTG. The rest of the assets were an afterthought.

The joke was on Hasbro because Nintendo canceled the Pokemon license in 2003, leaving Hasbro with MTG and that nostalgic afterthought, D&D. I wonder how Hasbro could acquire WOTC without some assurance about the Pokemon license. But D&D, in a business and cultural sense, of course became an amazing and I think very rare comeback story. (The story was from a few years ago; I don't know how D&D is doing right now.)

Now that Niantic was bought, how will Nintendo prevent any damage to the brand from the 'seemingly' money grab changes to Pokémon Go?