Iwata: At that time, Ishihara-san, you would chair a weekly meeting where you’d oversee each of the products being licensed.
Ishihara: That was the copyright meeting. At first, there were between 10 and 20 new proposals for various products each week. We used to line them up on a large table in the meeting room...
Morimoto: But it wasn’t long before we ran out of space on the desk... (laughs)
2009 “Iwata Asks” interview between the late Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata and Game Freak developers
I. Sleeper Hit
(Note: this is the third part of a series that began with After Godzilla and continued with Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology.)
There are several good reasons why Pocket Monsters Red and Green should have flopped when finally released in February 1996:
They were released for the seven-year-old Game Boy, a system well past its prime, if not outright geriatric. Nintendo itself was already well into development on its successor, the Game Boy Color.
As RPGs with a scrolling text introduction, fairly extensive dialogue and strategic managerial elements, they were not the ‘pick up and play’ games that had seen the most success on the Game Boy. The system’s bestselling titles up to that point were two single-screen puzzle games, Tetris and Dr. Mario, and three side-scrollers in the Super Mario Land series.
Game Freak was not a household name among gamers the way Capcom or Konami or Square were. It had never developed a true hit, with the possible exception of Yoshi (1990), and all of its games were published by other companies under their brands.
Pocket Monsters was an original, unknown property, not a sequel to a successful game or a tie-in to a popular movie. No one outside of the Game Freak offices had any idea what a Pikachu was.
The two games were released in February, the ‘the dumping month’ for video games with low publisher expectations. (The Hollywood equivalent is of course in January; if you’re around my age, you’ll recall that each January of the late 2000s and early 2010s seemed to bring an increasingly shabby Nicholas Cage vehicle.)
“It really was a quiet start,” Red and Green producer and future Pokémon Company president Tsunekazu Ishihara would later recall. “I remember looking at the weekly sales figures and feeling that we were just hovering around the edges of the top ten.”
“We were thinking,” Junichi Masuda told an interviewer in 2018, “maybe if we could sell a million units, that would be a great dream-come-true kind of situation.” By the end of 1998, it had sold more than 10 million copies in Japan, which then had a population of 126.4 million.
In a 2009 interview, Ishihara identified three major reasons for the games’ meteoric rise to popularity. First, he cites “the power of word of mouth”, noting that “in 1996, people weren’t writing their own internet blogs, but word steadily spread about how much fun Pokémon was.” (As I’ve previously mentioned, the viral popularity of Pikachu likely played a major role in this.)
Second, Ishihara himself had already initiated Pokémon’s first steps into a wider multimedia world, starting a long partnership with the children’s manga magazine Monthly CoroCoro Comic. (CoroCoro still publishes Pokémon manga and sneak previews of new games 25 years later.) Like Disney before them, Pokémon would push synergy into new, lucrative directions.
Finally, Red and Green shipped with 150 Pokémon that players could acquire normally and a mysterious 151st that they could not. “We put in Mew at the very end,” programmer Shigeki Morimoto later recalled.
The cartridge was really full and there wasn’t room for much more on there. Then the debug features which weren’t going to be included in the final version of the game were removed, creating a miniscule 300 bytes of free space. So we thought that we could slot Mew in there.
Not part of the game proper, Mew occasionally showed up due to bugs, creating an urban legend. TIME reporters Tim Larimer and Takashi Yokota asked Satoshi Tajiri about Mew in 1999. “It created a myth about the game,” he replied. “That there was an invisible character out there… introducing a character like that created a lot of rumors and myths about the game. It kept the interest alive.” Capitalizing on this interest, Game Freak partnered with Monthly CoroCoro Comic for the ‘Legendary Pokémon Offer,’ a sweepstakes whose winners would have a Mew added to their game cartridges. 78,000 people entered this contest.
A year and a half after they were first released, the Pokémon games finally topped the Japanese weekly charts for the first time. By then, Pokémon had grown into much more than a Game Boy game.
II. Growth
It wasn’t until later when you started seeing, ‘OK, there’s going to be an animated series. Oh, there’s going to be a card game. Now there’s a manga weekly publication.’ When these things expanded into the multimedia thing in Japan, we really started to feel like ‘oh wow this is a big deal now.’
Junichi Masuda, 2018 interview
After the release of Red and Green, Tajiri, Masuda, Ken Sugimori and the rest of the team immediately returned to work on a bigger, better Pokémon game. As with Red and Green, they put this project on hold to work on other games, in this case two variations of those games that capitalized on their incredible, growing popularity. Pocket Monsters Blue Version, an enhanced special edition of Red and Green, came out in October 1996 and was originally sold through a special mail-in offer from Monthly CoroCoro Comic. September 1998 saw the release of Pocket Monsters Pikachu, known in the English-speaking world as Pokémon Yellow Version, a Pikachu-centric remake with some anime-inspired additions.
But the main project remained what became Pokémon Gold and Silver, which all involved intended to be the ultimate and last Pokémon games; production dragged on for well over three years, with multiple delayed release dates, before the games finally came out in November 1999. In his interview with the late Satoru Iwata, Ishihara recalled that his tireless work on building the Pokémon brand began as a way to fund these games’ development and build anticipation for their eventual release. “I felt that this was my primary role,” Ishihara told Iwata. “I worked with the assumption that after we put out Gold and Silver, my work as far as Pokémon was concerned would be done.” (As of 2023, Ishihara remains the president and CEO of The Pokémon Company, a position he has held since 2000.)
With Game Freak busy developing new games, Ishihara recognized the need for the team behind Pokémon to grow from a game developer with licensing agreements into a true multinational corporation:
Game Freak really had their hands full and wouldn't have had the capacity to work on the next title. The necessity to properly gather together all of the strands of brand management and overseeing licensing led to the establishment of The Pokémon Company.
Overseeing Pokémon’s incredible growth, at first through his weekly licensing meetings, Ishihara earned the nickname ‘king of portable toys.’
The rest of this post will survey this kingdom in chronological order, from the original games’ release to September 1998, when Pokémon evolved from a Japanese phenomenon into an international phenomenon. This guided tour will be necessarily incomplete, as there is a general lack of widely available English-language sources on Pokémon before it hit America. For instance, I can’t find specific dates and sources for the Pokémon toy line, which was worth an estimated $400 million by summer 1998. Similarly, details on the development and launch of the Pokémon Trading Card Game continue to elude me.
And, of course, the Pokémon phenomenon in Japan as in America set off an explosion of licensed merchandise that did not leave much of a paper trail: t-shirts, stickers, keychains, notebooks, non-Pokémon Trading Card Game playing cards, postcards, candies, earrings, necklaces, lunchboxes.
According to a 1998 Los Angeles Times article, more than a thousand licensed Pokémon products were on Japanese shelves by the end of that year. Here’s a look at a few of the highlights.
February 1996
Nintendo releases Pocket Monsters Red and Green for the Game Boy. Initially modest hits, the games would become the best-selling titles in Game Boy history. Altogether, Pokémon Red, Green, Blue and Yellow have sold more than 46 million copies worldwide.
In their 1999 TIME Magazine cover story about the Pokémon phenomenon, Howard Chua-Eoan and Tim Larimer use a nautical metaphor to describe the process of playing the original games: “Seven-year-olds navigate unerringly through the minuscule screen that is the porthole to Pokédom, punching two tiny buttons and a cross-shaped cursor bar to find their way.”
This is a perfect description in more than one way. A ship’s crew and passengers look out of a porthole to see rough waves, islands, storm-threatening skies, distant coastlines. It connotes voyaging, discovery, adventure, and vicarious adventure is a magnet for children too young for adventures of their own. Undoubtedly, a large part of Pokémon’s global and intergenerational appeal is the way it offers an ideal childish wish fulfillment fantasy: leaving home and parental supervision to go on a grand adventure that involves not just meeting but taming fantastical creatures in a world that is exciting without being too dangerous. When one’s world is limited to home, the backyard, school and occasional outings with parents, the small increments of surprise and discovery doled out in 15 minutes of gameplay or in 22 minutes of a daily cartoon can offer the true flavor of adventure.
Second, the miniscule screen on which this adventure takes place is an advantage rather than a limitation. (An original Game Boy screen is 4.7 cm by 4.3 cm, roughly the size of two postage stamps.) In the previous post I quoted the late Game Boy designer Gunpei Yokoi, who said that the rocket ship built by the player’s imagination is much better than the rocket ship displayed on the screen, and C.S. Lewis, who wrote that a toy’s very lack of detail pushes the child to imagine more. In the same way, Pokémon’s minimal graphics, lack of full color and simple worldbuilding creates room for the imagination.
This helps explain why, unlike most video game series, Pokémon is primarily on handheld systems with a few ventures into the world of home consoles, rather than vice versa; Pokémon is the perfect world to be seen through that tiny porthole. While home consoles have featured many Pokémon spinoffs, beginning with Pokémon Stadium for the Nintendo 64, mainline Pokémon RPGs have been exclusive to Nintendo handhelds since 1996.
Of course, there’s also a business reason for this handheld exclusivity — each new Pokémon generation serves as a killer app for and pushes sales of Nintendo’s newest handheld console. But, as someone who loved Pokémon as a child, I think that the fact that the player has only a small porthole onto the Pokémon world contributes to the series’ charm.
April 1996
The very first Pokémon manga, Kosaku Anakubo’s Pocket Monsters, premieres in CoroCoro Special. This manga has never received a North American release, although it has been translated into Cantonese, Indonesian, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese. (And, per one source, into Singaporean English.) According to the long-running Pokémon fansite Dogasu’s Backpack, “the series places most of its emphasis on filling each chapter with as many sight gags and absurd situations as possible.”
Unlike pre-Disney buyout Star Wars, Pokémon has never had strict continuity: no true dividing line between canon and non-canon. Instead, each manga artist, card illustrator and anime writer took the rather sparse world of the Game Boy games and ran with it in his or her own direction.
Perhaps the best illustration of this come via the various versions of Sabrina (originally Natsume in Japanese), the Saffron City gym leader. She has very little personality in the Game Boy games; the salient fact about her is that she has psychic powers just like her Pokémon.
She begins the Pokémon Adventures manga as a villainess, a Team Rocket collaborator who uses her Pokémon’s powers to create a psychic barrier around Saffron City and participates in the Rocket plan to take over the world by fusing all three legendary birds into one superpower of a creature. Like the other Team Rocket-affiliated gym leaders, she eventually teams up with the manga’s heroes against a bigger threat in the Yellow chapter.
The anime version of Sabrina has a split personality that manifests as two separate individuals: her innocent but creepy child self, who just wants to play, and her cold, intimidating adult self, who isolates herself from human contact in order to perfect her psychic powers. Adult Sabrina shrinks the protagonists down to the size of dolls so that they can serve as playthings for child Sabrina. “Sabrina is a dangerous Pokémon trainer,” her estranged father warns Ash after saving him and his friends. “Next time you won’t be so lucky. You’ll be trapped in her toybox for eternity.”
Toshiro Ono’s manga The Electric Tale of Pikachu, a loose adaptation of the anime, features a kinder, gentler Sabrina who serves Ash a bowl of rice and invites him to stay at her gym. (Ash describes her as a “sweet girl” in his internal monologue; the manga heavily hints at a romantic relationship between her and Brock.) Instead of ending her reign of terror, as in the other adaptations, Ash and Brock save her from an ancient, gigantic, abnormally powerful ghost whose devouring of her soul leaves her hospitalized and comatose.
Even Sabrina’s hair color varies, from black to purple to dark green to dark grey.
This room for interpretation has also made Pokémon one of the most popular fanfiction topics on the internet. Fanfiction.net lists 104,000 Pokémon fanfics, more than any other video game; Archive of Our Own lists more than 50,500.
October 1996
Nintendo releases Pocket Monsters Blue Version. As previously mentioned, this game was initially available as a special magazine promotion before its general release. While generally the same game as Red and Green, Blue included several changes from and improvements over its predecessors:
Redesigned Pokémon sprites
New Pokédex entries
Several fixed glitches
One redesigned dungeon (Cerulean Cave)
Minor graphical and interface improvements
According to Bulbapedia, Blue originally commemorated Pokémon’s first 1 million sales. As with Red and Green, the game lacks a handful of Pokémon, forcing the player to trade with a friend or — better yet for Nintendo — buy all three versions.
International translations are based on this game, not the original Red and Green; one internet rumor has it that Nintendo/Game Freak released Red and Blue in the United States in the hope that Americans would be drawn to the colors of their flag.
October 1996 also saw the release of the very first Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) cards. The initial Base Set of 102 cards featured illustrations from Pokémon cocreator Ken Sugimori, who drew the majority of the cards, as well as prolific Pokémon artist Mitsuhiro Arita and computer graphics artist Keiji Kinebuchi. (Tsunekazu Ishihara, the driving force beyond the creation of the TCG, is the only real-world human being to appear on a Pokémon card.)
One number says it all about Pokémon cards and their continuing popularity. 9 billion Pokémon cards were printed in 2021, more than one for every human being on the planet.
I lack the time, space and interest to fully dive into Pokémon card collecting and the economy it has created. (If you’re curious, the world’s most expensive Pokémon card is currently the Japanese holographic illustrator Pikachu, which is worth approximately $6 million; fewer than 20 exist.) Similarly, I have not played the Pokémon TCG itself since I was about eleven years old and thus will not delve into that game’s strategy and still-ongoing competitive scene.
Instead, throughout this series I’ve spotlighted individual card illustrations for how they contribute to the sense of each Pokémon as a creature in an ecosystem. This is precisely what I loved about Pokémon cards as a child.
In the Game Boy games, the player pretty much only interacts with the Pokémon themselves in battle or in their captivity inside of Poké Balls. Any description of how a Pokémon behaves in the wild is limited to a one- or two-sentence Pokédex entry. In the card illustrations, on the other hand, they live in their natural habitats. Charmander accidentally lights a tuff of grass on fire with its flaming tail; Machop, standing atop a mountain, lifts a heavy boulder as if he was Atlas and it was the sky; Golem rolling down the red-hot side of a volcano; Grimer lurking at night in an industrial area, underneath a full moon; Exeggcutor lazing on a tropical beach, its back resting against a non-animate palm tree, a crab scurrying around its feet; Jigglypuff sitting in the branches of a tree, singing its song as the setting sun paints the sky salmon-pink and gold.
March 1997
Hidenori Kusaka’s Pokémon Adventures manga premieres in the Shogakukan magazine 4th Grade Elementary School. As of 2023, Pokémon Adventures (formerly known in English as Pokémon Special) has lasted for 59 volumes and is still going on.
Mato, the original illustrator, retired from the series in 2001 due to illness and was replaced by Satoshi Yamamoto, who has since illustrated fifty volumes. The most successful Pokémon manga, it has been translated into at least fourteen languages, including Chinese, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Malaysian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai and Vietnamese. According to one source, Pokémon Adventures has sold 150 million copies across the world.
“I got into the Pokémon franchise thanks to being in the right place at the right time,” Kusaka told Anime News Network in 2016.
I was 26 and the first Pokémon video games were just starting to get famous, so Nintendo wanted to make a Pokémon manga — at that time, The Pokémon Company didn't even exist. I was available at that moment, so they offered me the chance to start working on the series.
Kusaka jumped on the opportunity to fulfill his childhood dream of becoming a professional mangaka. Teaming up with illustrator Mato, he wrote a story focused on the Pokémon battles themselves, putting them in a more epic good vs. evil/saving the world context than the original games’ “story of one boy’s summer.”
Pokémon Adventures is by far the bestselling Pokémon manga and generally held in high regard by fans. Cocreator Satoshi Tajiri once called it “the comic that most resembles the world I was trying to convey.” On the other hand, Jason Thompson gives it a scathing 1.5 star review in Manga: The Complete Guide:
Written for elementary school students, it has simple cartoony art with lots of big sound effects (apparently influenced by American comics) and the story lines are those of fighting manga, with Pokémon trainers constantly dueling one another.
Pokémon Adventures “adds nothing to the games,” he concludes, “and has little to appeal to older readers.”
As an older reader who’s read the first few volumes of Pokémon Adventures to research this post, I have to agree with Thompson. The manga has a few interesting moments, including an infamous hentai joke that somehow snuck past American censors, but on the whole it’s monotonous, repetitive series of battles with not much else happening. Then again, I’m sure I would have quite enjoyed it 25 years ago.
March 1997 also sees the first Trading Card Game expansion set, Jungle, hit Japanese shelves. (It would get an English-language North American release in June 1999.) The Jungle set shines a spotlight on the art of Kagemaru Himeno, who has since become one of the most prolific Pokémon card illustrators.
Inspired by the in-universe Pokémon nature preserves known as the Safari Zone, the set includes many of the Safari Zone-exclusive Pokémon, including Rhyhorn, Exeggcute and Kangaskhan. It adds only one non-Pokémon Trainer Card, the Poké Ball.
April 1997
The Pokémon anime first airs on Japanese television. In the first episode, known in English as “Pokémon, I Choose You!,” Ash sets out on a quest that recently ended after more than 25 years and more than 1,200 episodes; Ash and Pikachu’s final episode aired in March with the anime continuing on with other characters. Like all subsequent Pokémon episodes and films, the anime’s debut is produced by OLM, Inc., also known for anime like Berserk, Yo-Kai Watch and multiple animated adaptations of Bandai’s Tamagotchi.
Ishihara had initially opposed adapting Pokémon into an animated series. “After researching all sorts of previous data,” he would later recall, “I learned that animated series on television tend not to last very long. So even when a series based on a game starts, it tends to last six months or, at most, a year.” Knowing Game Freak tendency towards long production cycles, Ishihara correctly predicted that an ordinary-length anime would be off the air by the time Gold and Silver finally came out; the Pokémon anime of course proved to be extraordinarily popular and long-lived.
The Game Freak staffers themselves had very little input into the anime and were uncertain of its prospects. One aspect in particular made them hesitate: the way the onscreen Pokémon repeat their own names over and over again instead of roaring, chirping, growling and squeaking as in the Game Boy games. In a 2018 interview, Junichi Masuda recalled the first time he heard Ikue Ōtani voice Pikachu. “They showed us a clip of it and we listened to the sound of it saying its name over and over in a really cute way. We weren’t really sure about it, but it worked out.” (As mentioned in a previous post, OLM chose Pikachu as the show’s star Pokémon because of its viral popularity and appeal to both boys and girls.) Masuda also credits (or blames) OLM with creating Jesse, James and Meowth, the show’s trio of bumbling Team Rocket villains.
Early on, the major creative force behind the Pokémon anime was writer Takeshi Shudo, who serves as the show’s chief writer, wrote the screenplays for the first three Pokémon movies, and cocreated the second-generation legendary Pokémon Lugia.
Like many viewers, Shudo eventually got bored with the limits imposed on the Pokémon anime. “Just how long can you go on with the same formula?” he asks himself in a blog post.
A new Pokémon appears. Ash catches it. He fights other trainers at a gym or at the League Tournament. Team Rocket tries to stand in his way. He overcomes the obstacle and wins… For better or worse, there’s no place for the characters to grow. Children grow up quickly. I wanted to create a story that keeps up with their growth. But if Pokémon is doing well, I guess you could say there’s no need to fix something that’s not broken.
In one of his last blog posts, Shudo describes his vision for a definitive Pokémon anime ending.
The Pokémon would stage a rebellion much like Spartacus in ancient Rome. Although at first glance Pokémon appear to be friends with humans, they would realize they’re actually being used like slaves, which would lead to an uprising. Pikachu would become the leader of the revolt and end up fighting with Ash. Team Rocket, who are in possession of lots of sinister Pokemon (including Meowth, who can translate the Pokémon language into human speech) would try to mediate the conflict, but they’d do a poor job of interpreting and only make things worse… If it could ever be produced, I think it would literally have to be the last episode ever.
Instead of giving the series a definitive ending, Shudo would leave in 2002 due to both his boredom with its increasingly repetitive storylines and his own increasing dependence on drugs and alcohol; he died in 2010 and the anime has continued on long after his death, repeating the same formulas.
The same month, Toshiro Ono’s manga The Electric Tale of Pikachu, a loose adaptation of the anime, debuts in Bessatsu CoroCoro Comic Special. “I didn’t know what I was getting myself into,” Ono told an Animerica interviewer in 1999. “The manga started about a month before the anime did, but I didn’t think then that it would last so long.” Ono’s manga would last for four volumes (1997-2000), all of which were translated into English; the first issue of the English translation is the only million-selling comic book in the United States over the past thirty years.
The Electric Tale of Pikachu is the only Pokémon manga I encountered as a child; I have a strangely vivid memory of reading the chapter “Haunting My Dreams” at my uncle’s house. As an adult, I find it to be the best first-generation Pokémon manga by some distance. Of course, it’s just a children’s comic — although aimed at a necessarily older audience because it requires the ability to read — and often childish but of all the Pokémon adaptations I think it best expresses the central promise that Pokémon makes, the promise of adventure through a fantastical landscape dotted with strange places and populated by fantastical creatures. (The addition of snark and romantic comedy is the icing on the cake.) I just enjoy Ono’s landscapes in The Electric Tale of Pikachu, and the architectural and cultural details he invents.
Furthermore, unlike the anime and the Pokémon Adventures manga, which have both continued on and on and on over more than two decades, this manga has a definite beginning, middle and end (an ending that of course promises future adventures) and I appreciate it for that. If someone ever took Pokémon’s first generation and actually told a great story with it, I think it would be closer to this manga than to any other version.
I’ve already discussed The Electric Tale of Pikachu quite a bit in this series and will likely due so in future posts because of how well it presents Pokémon as mythical creatures in a mythical world.
June 1997
The second Pokémon TCG expansion, Fossil, is released. In addition to the obvious fossil Pokémon, the set also includes a number of fan favorites never before seen in card form, including Articuno, Gengar, Ekans and Slowbro. (With the Fossil expansion, all 151 Pokémon, save Mew, are represented on at least one card.) New Trainer Cards include Mysterious Fossil, Gambler, Energy Search and Mr. Fuji.
Also in June, the now defunct record label Pikachu Records releases the Pokémon anime soundtrack on CD.
July 1997
Yumi Tsukurino’s manga Magical Pokémon Journey premieres in the teenage girls’ manga magazine Ciao. It lasted for ten volumes, the last of which was published in 2003. It has received partial translations into Mandarin, Cantonese, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish and full translations into Thai, Korean and Indonesian.
Manga reviewer Jason Thompson gives it a much more positive review than Pokémon Adventures, describing it as “funnier than the material demands.” He also correctly notes how much it varies from every other version of the Pokémon world; its Pokémon talk, occasionally live in houses, and help and/or hinder protagonist Hazel’s quest to win the love of Pokémon trainer Almond. Yes, this is a romantic comedy almost Pokémon battling, the quest to become a Pokémon master, the nefarious plots of Team Rocket and other hallmarks of Pokémon stories across various media.
Having perused the first volume, I’d describe Magical Pokémon Journey as, by far, the cutest piece of Pokémon media I’ve ever seen. I would borrow two words from two different languages, combine them, and describe it as über-kawaii.
To quote a blurb from the back cover of the English translation, it is “overflowing with cuteness and flowers.”
August 1997
Shogakukan publishes the first volume of Pokémon Wonderland magazine.
November 1997
The TCG gets its third expansion, the Team Rocket set. (It would receive a North American release in April 2000). The set includes 83 cards and features colorful, whimsical, at times superflat illustrations by new Pokémon artist Sumiyoshi Kizuki.
December 1997
Pokémon gains international notoriety by making perhaps the worst possible impression on non-Japanese audience. To quote the New York Daily News,
Panic gripped Japan yesterday after an animated TV monster flashed his red eyes and hundreds of children collapsed in convulsions across the nation. Nearly 600 children were rushed to emergency rooms Tuesday night after watching “Pokemon,” or “Pocket Monsters,” a TV show based on characters in a Nintendo game.
“Electric Soldier Porygon,” the infamous 38th episode of the Pokémon anime, was broadcast for the first and last time on December 16th, 1997. It has never been re-broadcast in Japan or shown in any other country due to a sequence with flashing lights that triggered epileptic seizures in young viewers. In a truly inexplicable lapse in judgment, at least one Japanese news show broadcast the scene in question, causing another round of seizures and hospitalizations.
All in all, between 600 and 700 children were hospitalized in the aftermath of the “Electric Soldier Porygon” incident. Pokémon was taken off air and removed from the shelves of video rental stores pending an investigation. The value of Nintendo stock fell and all involved went into immediate damage control mode. Pokémon became first a news story and then a punchline in the English-speaking world, inspiring parodies on The Simpsons (‘Battling Seizure Robots’ from the season 10 episode “Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo”) and South Park (the third season episode “Chinpokomon” in which Kenny suffers from an anime-induced epileptic seizure.)
Depending on which account you read, the episode’s seizure-inducing flashes were caused by either Pikachu’s lightning bolts or Team Rocket’s weapons, not by the polygonal digital Pokémon Porygon itself. Despite this, Porygon and its eventual evolutions have remained persona non grata in the Pokémon universe. Porygon has never starred in a post-seizures anime episode and has cameo appearances in just three of 1,233 episodes; neither of its evolutions Porygon2 and Porygon-Z have ever appeared in the anime.
In September 2020, the official Pokémon Twitter account tweeted the phrase “Porygon did nothing wrong” in a tweet that was eventually deleted due to overwhelming backlash over its perceived insensitivity. While it has shown up multiple times in the games and on cards since 1998, the anime Porygon remains canceled.
(Pikachu, who it took the blame for, has gone on to become a global pop culture icon. Such is the way of the world.)
December 1997-April 1998
The Pokémon anime remains off the air during the Porygon incident investigation.
During this time, Game Freak developers remain hard at work on two projects, Pokémon Yellow and the second-generation Gold and Silver. “Though we were creating the games with a very small team,” in the words of programmer Shigeki Morimoto, “we were very greedy in terms of all the features we wanted to include in the games. I think that may be why they experienced such a difficult birth.” (Another factor was the need to devote time and resources to the games’ English translations.)
Reading various interviews gives me the impression that the game development side of Game Freak continued in the same semi-indie way as a before whereas the licensing and merchandising side led by Ishihara quickly became much more professional, corporate and strategic. (As previously mentioned, this side of Pokémon would literally become its own company in 2000.)
March 1998
The Pokémon Pikachu portable digital pet/step counter hits Japanese shelves. Ishihara, who saw it as a perfect expression of his love of portability, would revisit the same concept several times in the next twenty years: the direct followup Pocket Pikachu Color! Gold and Silver Together! (1999), the 2008 Nintendo DS step counter Walk With Me (aka Personal Trainer: Walking), and eventually Pokémon Go (2016).
April 1998
On April 11th, Japanese broadcasters air a sixty-minute television special whose title literally translates as Anime: Pocket Monsters Problem Inspection Report. This report identifies flickering blue and red lights as the cause of the seizures and features an apology from TV Tokyo’s president. The hosts announce the implementation of new anti-seizure best practices for anime.
The Pokémon anime returns after a four-month hiatus on the 16th with a special introduction. Surrounded by stuffed Pokémon, host Miyuki Yadama reassures viewers that “from now on all episodes of Pocket Monsters and other anime are being made with great care” to avoid further seizures. After reading several letters from children asking for the return of the Pokémon anime, Yadama gives a safety tip — “when you watch television, do be sure to do so in a brightly lit area, distancing yourself from the screen as much as possible” — and then introduces a special two-part episode.
The first part of this double-header, “Pikachu’s Goodbye,” is probably second only to “Bye Bye Butterfree” as the most tearjerking episode of Pokémon’s original series. In it, Pikachu is torn between staying with Ash and leaving him to join other Pikachu in an idyllic forest. It ends with a heartwarming reunion between the trainer and his Pokémon that I’m sure had a special resonance for its first viewers returning to their favorite show.
Also in April, the first Pokémon Center retail store opens in Tokyo. Over the past quarter-century, Pokémon Centers have expanded to a chain of 16 Japanese stores and one Singaporean store. (The former New York Pokémon Center is now Nintendo New York, Nintendo of America’s flagship store.)
Shogakukan publishes Satomi Nakamura’s one-volume manga Pocket Monsters Zensho (Pocket Monsters Complete Book Comic Edition), which is released as a single standalone book rather than serialized. Never translated into English, it been published in Cantonese in Hong Kong and in Mandarin in Taiwan. Dogasu’s Backpack notes that it
follows the video game closer than any other manga incarnation of Pokémon… there are many things in this manga that haven't been represented in the anime or any of the other manga, such as what the Silph Scope would look like and the search for the Safari warden's dentures.
July 1998
Pocket Monsters the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back! a.k.a. Pokémon the First Movie premieres in theaters and becomes the year’s second highest-grossing film in Japan. (The North American release, which I will cover in the next post, would happen over a year later, in November 1999; I’ll revisit the movie if and when I ever get to Mewtwo, Pokémon #150.)
August 1998
Nintendo releases Pokémon Stadium for the Nintendo 64. Codeveloped by Nintendo and HAL Laboratory (of Kirby and Super Smash Bros. fame), the game allows players to transfer their Pokémon from the Game Boy to the N64 and pit them against another player or the computer in 3d polygonal battles.
Never released outside of Japan, this game features only forty Pokémon; the international versions, featuring all 151, are translations of the expanded sequel Pokémon Stadium 2, which was originally released in Japan in April 1999. Together, the various versions of this game sell approximately 4 million copies. A sequel known as Pokémon Stadium Gold & Silver in Japan and Pokémon Stadium 2 in other countries is released in 2000.
September 1998
Nintendo releases Pokémon Yellow Version: Special Pikachu Edition (aka Pokémon Yellow) for the Game Boy. (I’ve already discussed Yellow in a previous post.)
III. Global Ambitions
I’d never really witnessed a game selling like that before.
Former Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata, 2008 interview
Pokémon continued to grow and grow and grow despite the fallout from the Porygon seizure incident. According to a May 1998 Wall Street Journal article, the Pokémon multimedia franchise had grossed more than $4 billion in Japan alone over the preceding 18 months. As with Super Mario, Sonic and Sailor Moon before it, Pokémon’s phenomenal success in its native country attracted the interest of American broadcasters and toymakers.
“It wasn’t just in Japan,” Ishihara would later recall. “Product proposals flooded in from overseas too… approving this volume of products simply wasn't a job that a single person could cope with.”
In Japan, as we’ve seen, Pokémon had grown from a pair of Game Boy games into a massive multimedia brand over a few years, adding one piece at a time. In the U.S., it would not be a video game, or an animated cartoon, or a set of trading cards, or a manga series, but all of the above, plus toys, snacks and a myriad of other licensed products. The market that turned sports cards, collectible comic books, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers and Beanie Babies into phenomena would also embrace Pokémon. As of 2023, it has never relaxed this embrace, letting the fad of fall/winter 1998 grow into something much bigger.
The next post in this series will tell that story.
Author’s Note: My apologies for the hiatus — I’ve been busy with other things, including my day job. I’ll be back to posts every second Wednesday for this spring and summer. As always, please share a post or two with a friend if you enjoy them and please let me know if there’s you’d particularly like to see on Earthly Delights.
A special welcome to my newest subscribers. I hope you enjoy your time here, both with upcoming posts and the archive.
Bibliography
Books
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Kent, Steven L. The Ultimate History of Video Games. Prisma Publishing, 2001.
Kusaka, Hidenori, and Mato. Pokémon Adventures 1. Chuang Yi, 2000.
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Nakamura, Satomi. Pocket Monsters Zensho. Shogakukan, 1998.
Ono, Toshihiro. Pokémon Graphic Novel, Volume 1: The Electric Tale Of Pikachu!. VIZ Media, 1999.
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Pokémon: Official Nintendo Player’s Guide. Nintendo of America, 1998.
Thompson, Jason. Manga: The Complete Guide. Del Ray, 2007.
Tsukirino, Yumi. Magical Pokémon Journey, Volume 1: A party with Pikachu. VIZ Media, 2001.
Articles
Aubrey, Dave and Ryan Woodrow. “The top 20 most expensive and rare Pokémon cards.” Fan Nation, 6 April 2023.
Chua-Eoan, Howard, and Tim Larimer. "Beware of the Pokemania." Time, 22 November 1999.
Dwyer, Theo. “‘Porygon Did Nothing Wrong’ Says Official Pokémon Twitter.” Bleeding Cool, 23 September 2020.
Frank, Allegra. “Pokémon Veteran Junichi Matsuda Reflects on the Series’ Early Days.” Polygon, 28 September 2018.
Gellene, Denise. “What's Pokemon? Just Ask Any Kid; TV show and Nintendo's elaborate sales pitch create a powerful holiday demand for its latest Game Boy offering.” Los Angeles Times, 10 December 1998.
Gordon, Nicholas. “The Pokémon Company printed 9 billion Pokémon cards last year, doubling production to stop speculators scoring 350-fold returns on rare cards.” Fortune, 6 July 2022.
Hilliard, Kyle. “Game Freak's Directors Share their Favorite Pokémon Spinoffs.” Game Informer, Aug. 15 2017.
--. “Pokémon's Creators on the Anime: We Weren't Really Sure About It.'" Aug. 17, 2017.
“Japanese Hit ‘Toon Will Give U.S. a Shot.” Orlando Sentinel, 22 February 1998.
Kennedy, Helen. “TV Cartoon Lights Zap 700 Japanese Kids: Apparent Seizures Triggered.” New York Daily News, 18 December 1997.
Kent, Steven L. “Are You Game? Nintendo Jazzes Up Game Boy with Color, a Camera and a Mini-Monster Named Pokemon.” Chicago Tribune, 6 August 1998.
Iwata, Satoru. “Iwata Asks: Pokémon HeartGold Version & Pokémon SoulSilver Version.” Nintendo.com.
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Larimer, Tim and Takashi Yokota. "The Ultimate Game Freak." Time, 2 November 1999.
Lee, Elizabeth. “Pokémon: TV monsters gobble big bucks.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 4 September 1998.
Pereira, Joseph. “Toys: Hasbro Hopes Japan’s ‘Pokemon’ Grabs U.S. Children.” Wall Street Journal, 26 May 1998.
Robb, Guido. “Get ready for Japan's next wave: Pokemon.” St. Petersburgh Times, 4 September 1998.
ha! this was my entire life around this time, as I recall the animated series came out in '96 and I was quite the intrepid little trainer...spent an embarrassing amount of allowance on those damn cards.
it's interesting to go back and take a second look at the phenomenon through adult eyes.
this brings back so many good memories from my childhood. i knew i shouldnt have let my step mom give away my charizard card along with all my others to the neighbors kid!!