Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit

https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/02/26/thirty-years-on-pokemon-is-still-a-monster-hit

by andsoitis • 5 months ago

85 114 5 months ago

It was a labor of love originally.

It was a beautiful attempt to reproduce a feeling of community that came from a bunch of kids collecting beetles in the woods for fun. Kids would need to get suggestions on where to go from other kids, and they'd show off the neat bugs they found and trade with other kids. The game was carefully designed to make kids work with each other and talk to each other. That's why you couldn't get all of the pokemon in only one game, and it's why some pokemon had ridiculous tricks to evolving them. It was wildly successful at that goal.

tiznow• 5 months ago

Roaming around the apartment complex I grew up, in with friends and a link cable meeting new kids and trading Pokemon were some of the best times of my life.

I'm still a Pokemon fan to this day. I play Go all the time, collect cards when they're not obscene to acquire, and I'll probably buy a Switch 2 when they come out with the upgrade to immerse myself in the online aspect of modern Pokemon games. Fantastic franchise.

someperson3• 5 months ago

It's just a fad

pennomi• 5 months ago

Just wait, in a thousand years archaeologists will be talking about our pantheon of monsters that were greatly revered by all.

elictronic• 5 months ago

There's Godwins law about comparing everything to nazis. Will there be someperson's law of completely misunderstanding what a word means?

someperson3• 5 months ago

It was sarcasm. Pokemon has been called a fad since it first gained popularity in 1998.

Though to be fair the Pokemania era of the early 2000s was a blip, the same way Pokemon Go had a short-lived popularity surge in 2016.

Pokemon is enduring.

FrustratedMonky3• 5 months ago

Unfortunately, Goodwins law has lead to many people fearing to point out obvious fascism.

Reversal of the Law: Mike Godwin himself has stated that his rule does not discredit efforts to make valid comparisons, particularly when democratic institutions are under threat.

lapetitejort• 5 months ago

You might be interested in Poe's Law [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

iammjm• 5 months ago

When does a fad stop being a fad and start being a canon or an icon or whatever? Is Shakespeare a fad? As a 8 years old I knew all Pokémons by name their powers and I have spent literally all my pocket money on Pokémon, and now almost 30 years later people still seem to dig it. Also I don’t think it ever really went away in the meanwhile too. But yeah it could also just be millennial nostalgia and the cyclical nature of cultural products which over and over resurfaces and recycles and remixes the stuff from the past

bogzz3• 5 months ago

I'm pretty sure that was sarcasm.

someperson3• 5 months ago

It's a joke, people have been calling Pokemon a fad since 1998. Pokemania in the early 2000s was bigger than the Pokemon Go moment in 2016. But Pokemon endures.

chao-• 5 months ago

Well with that attitude, you'll never catch 'em all!

crims0n3• 5 months ago

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.

joe_mamba• 5 months ago

I don't think your parents will enjoy the current crop of Star Wars IP.

boringg• 5 months ago

They might enjoy the skywalker ranch general store though!

crims0n3• 5 months ago

Unsurprisingly, only one of my kids has shown any interest in Star Wars, and it is not in any of the new IP.

themadturk• 5 months ago

As an OG Star Wars fan (I was 21 when it came out), I had a really hard time when my kids liked the prequel trilogy more than the originals. As my youngest once told me (when he was in his teens), the original trilogy was great, but the prequels were the Star Wars his generation grew up with, and that made a difference.

I'm fortunate that my kids grew up not only with their own favorites, but with appreciation for mine as well. The Star Wars comment opened my eyes to generational differences that have only grown since then, but at least with mutual respect for our differences. (And none of us really like the sequel trilogy that much).

thinkingtoilet• 5 months ago

I didn't watch/play anything pokemon as a kid, I think I was just a little too old for it when it came out. My son got into it and we learned to play the card game, started going to a local game store, etc... I have fallen in love with it. Yes, the characters are cute/cuddly/goofy but if you get into the actual card game it is a deep strategy game with so many fun ways to play. My son still likes it but has moved on from it as his favorite, I now enjoy it and play it more than he does.

juris2• 5 months ago

my wife and i were just musing to ourselves this morning about whether it was strange that the franchise hasn't died yet.

that conversation went somewhere along the lines of: "surely kids aren't interested in what their parents were/are interested in" (oh didn't we hate our parents' style) -- and then I remembered that I really wanted to see Speed Racer, which was what my dad was into in the late sixties. i still thought that the animation was about as impressive as pokemon at the time (funny how they animated more frames than one punch man these days!!!)

i think kids these days complain that their fat old parents are wearing (ostensibly 'millennial') graphic tees in public so there is plenty of generational rejection. but it's really weird how the internet hasn't developed more obvious generational 'coding' (except in language), and hasn't rejected things like pokemon entirely.

or is it pretty easy to code us? lol

their rejection of us aside (which is an evolutionary and biological thing) i wonder if our parents felt 'as connected' to us generationally speaking as we 'feel' we are to the next (socioeconomically and socio-digitally)?

mrguyorama• 5 months ago

Few franchises that span generations?

The entire current zeitgeist of popular media is about zombifying your parent's IP. It's Nintendo's entire business in fact. Sure, usually they are doing good work with that IP, but they are the outlier in the industry. Everyone else is shitting out remakes of what your daddy played that don't even understand the original material, or like Halo, remakes of what your daddy played which was already a mediocre remake.

Halo 1 came out the month after 9/11. It's old enough to have graduated college and started a family. It will be resold soon.

Jurassic Park was dug up out of the grave to crap out several more movies. Star Wars is inflating a couple good plot lines into an entire Universe of "Content". Even reality shows are made up of people who were contestants on older reality shows. Pixar is making yet another Toy Story.

Aliens is still going, long after it's reanimated corpse was overplayed.

One of the premier television series, that just finished, was all about nostalgia for living in the 80s, with some silly plot tacked on that apparently even the writers didn't care about.

Even our propaganda, like Top Gun, is basically the same script as an 80s movie with minimal changes.

It feels like the entire media ecosystem is designed around reselling content to my parent's generation before they finally kick the bucket or satisfying the nostalgia of that generation's early children. Even the President's administration bitches about things like the 90s USDA food pyramid that only affected that 13ish year segment of the population and was deprecated, twice, since then. Our authoritarianism is nostalgia based, for the time that generation was children, and things were "Simple" and "Good", because they were children and got to live the lives of kids.

crims0n3• 5 months ago

Maybe I should have qualified it with "successfully" span generations. I think most of the examples you give could be better explained as Member Berries, but I agree with the sentiment. I just don't think kids are as interesting in Halo, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, etc as we were - despite incredibly heavy handed pushes from studios.

anshulbhide• 5 months ago

Its the ultimate millennial throwback.

bogzz3• 5 months ago

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?

dlivingston• 5 months ago

If you still have the original cartridges, highly recommend getting a ModRetro Chromatic or an Analogue Pocket to replay them. I have the ModRetro and it has been a lot of fun rediscovering my old childhood games.

bogzz3• 5 months ago

I donated mine with my GameBoys to Red Cross when I turned 19 :(

But I ordered the new Pocket Taco, which is like a controller that is taco-shaped and clamps around your smartphone, kinda turning it into a gameboy.

lifesaverluke2• 5 months ago

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

ecliptik• 5 months ago

Very cool, we have some Korean Pokemon cards that this would work great on. Are you planning to support other languages?

PretzelPirate• 5 months ago

From your /en route, clicking on a card brings me to the /nl/cards route.

lifesaverluke2• 5 months ago

Will look into that. Thanks

Liftyee• 5 months ago

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.

exhumet3• 5 months ago

i mean overall the core pokemon experience has never changed, G/R/B, HGSS, Scarlet and Violet. Core gameplay is the exact thing you said, only paid differences are that now a days they do include some expansions (in the oldschool vein) that are often better than the current base games lol. But overall, outside of stuff like pokemongo, the CORE game franchise has largely been unaffected by a lot of the trends of modern gaming. And great choice, HGSS are a highpoint of the series. Might i also suggest Black and White and Black and White 2. the first time IMO they really tried to make the games more story heavy and they succeeded. The music and pixel art in BW is unmatched as well.

sdsd• 5 months ago

If you like the core games I highly recommend PokeMMO. It's the first five games glued together into an MMO and it's free.

JoshTriplett2• 5 months ago

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.

bubblewand3• 5 months ago

From what I can tell the staying power seems to be in:

1) New players. More of ‘em born every year! And,

2) Competitive play, which is a huge thing (I hate playing most games with randos online, personally, but lots of people love it). Like with any multiplayer game (call of duty, say) you need the latest entry or you’ll be looking at a ghost town in the multiplayer lobbies. Plus you get to experience the meta evolving, so it’s more dynamic than playing on an older one. They’ve got this whole graded ranking and matching system and a bunch of leaderboard stuff going on.

I only know about the latter because I know a guy who usually spends at least a little time way up near the top of the rankings each time a new one of these comes out. Seems like a pretty large scene.

JoshTriplett2• 5 months ago

I think it also attracts many different kinds of players (with overlap between them). Some of the same MtG "player personality archetypes" apply to Pokemon: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Player_type : hyper-competitive players, players who like swinging with the biggest baddest coolest Pokemon they can get, and combo players who like figuring out just the right combination of mechanics if you bring in some move from six games ago plus an item from three games ago plus a new Pokemon that just made the combo possible. Also throw in aspects like grinding for shinies or EVs.

Different appreciations for asethetics apply as well: people who get really into the lore, people who really enjoy specific Pokemon (look at Yellow, or the Let's Go games), people who just want "whatever has the best stats".

And each new game tends to take all of those archetypes into account when creating new content.

ecshafer• 5 months ago

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.

teeray• 5 months ago

Why as an adult you would play Pokemon over SMT is something I can't get.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

jmarcher• 5 months ago

Why as an adult you would play Pokemon

Oh, I don't want to play Pokémon games, but every few hours, I am given the controller and told to beat the boss with a team composed of 6 low-level Pikachus and zero healing items.

exhumet3• 5 months ago

i play both! there is a sort of comfort in pokemon, like watching your favorite movie or eating junkfood, but i also love me a gourmet meal too. room for both! who doesnt wanna play a game with their favorite little doods, getting see what others can become favorites and then ya know everyone else playing so its a fun community thing. i also do love the grinding especially in the older games, and the RNG is fun to me. love when that 1% encounter rate hits after 30 mins of searching.

sunaookami• 5 months ago

Newer Pokémon games have way more quality-of-life such as EXP share and way faster animations so it's not a slog anymore. Recently finished Scarlet and enjoyed it very much. Currently replaying SoulSilver and I couldn't play it without cheats that make the game a bit faster (cutting repetitive animations, making the game run at 60 FPS, etc.) since everything is so slow.

I'm nearing 30 and have played a lot of JRPGs in my life.

treesknees• 5 months ago

I completely agree with this. I'm playing through Leaf Green, and I'm around 8 hours in with just a single badge. I don't think I'd get through it without the boost of nostalgia for the GBC/GBA games. The newest games are nothing like the slog we went through as kids.

bkandel• 5 months ago

As far as I can tell, my kids and their friends never actually play the game either, they just collect the cards. I don't think they even know the rules.

basch2• 5 months ago

once they get a phone they switch from cards to go.

juris2• 5 months ago

Why as an adult you would play Pokemon over SMT is something I can't get

bro are you serious? smt is the definition of painful in terms of time sunk and the newer pokemon games have so many guard rails; i can mindlessly blast through the whole story and craft a quick crew to beat down my wife and friends and just be done ;p

now granted, would I rather play (and 100 percent complete) any SMT game? yes. how do adults do it? i watched my friend who's an RN on hospital hours + has three kids blast through cyberpunk and the answer is pretty simple: sleep is for the weak.

Blackthorn• 5 months ago

SMT is your example here for the anti-grind, anti-boring-tbc?

I guess SMT2 was bizarrely anti-grind in a sense, but I dropped it when it turned out that leveling up made me weaker.

nrb• 5 months ago

Players have come up with a variety of self-imposed challenge modes to make the game more dynamic, Nuzlocke being most famous: https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Nuzlocke_Challenge

nitwit005• 5 months ago

The grinding is less of an issue than being too easy. You can play through a number of the games with just your starter pokemon, playing with close to no strategy at all.

People add artificial difficulty through extra rules, which seems like a strange thing to have to do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuzlocke

bombcar3• 5 months ago

"You're playing it wrong" - Pokemon can be played with a min/max grinding attitude, or it can be played as digital cockfights that you futz around with from time to time.

Some people really like relatively "mindless" entertainment that they can do while doing other things. Hell, that describes the vast majority of mobile games.

jogu• 5 months ago

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).

As someone who was played every entry since the 90s I can't even imagine how you could come away as Pokemon games being "grindy", assuming you're talking about just playing through the story. EXP share has been a standard mechanic for the past few generations that have effectively eliminated any grinding.

I'm also not really sure where you're getting "massive amounts" of RNG from either. Sure, moves can miss but it's never consequential enough that it could ruin a run or something. At most you lose a few minutes having to run back somewhere.

FrustratedMonky3• 5 months ago

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

haunter3• 5 months ago

You mean Pokemon TCG which introduced illegal unregulated gambling for millions of kids (since 1996)? Don’t forget to buy the next pack for the special holo Raichu DX Spring Edition.

Don’t pretend that Game Freak/Creatures/Nintendo are some saints.

anomaly_• 5 months ago

What on earth are you talking about? 1) card collecting isn't gambling because there is no expectation of winning money, 2) Baseball and sports cards have been a thing for like 100 years at this point.

perardi• 5 months ago

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.

poetril• 5 months ago

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.

exhumet3• 5 months ago

should check out the Legacy line of romhacks, ie Crystal Legacy, Emerald Legacy. if youre ever in the mood for vanilla+. very very high quality releases made with intention and care for the base games.

For absolutely crazy releases, Pokemon Unbound is an absolutely next level romhack

irishcoffee• 5 months ago

In my head there are and only ever will be ~151 pokemon. I played red/blue when they launched as 8-bit wonders. I could never get into the rest of them.

asdff4• 5 months ago

Pokemon is one of the worst games for min maxing into a broken game. You go on the subreddits and everyone runs the same perfectly optimal team with the same perfectly optimal movesets. Playing like that probably is remarkably boring, but also once you learn of these patterns and playstyles it becomes hard not to consider using them. Like games that give you free money cheats, the seems great for a second then the drive to actually play the game as it was meant to be played is lost.

I've tried to keep my pokemon knowledge free and clear from this influence. I don't look up anything. I don't really understand the meta beyond basic type matchups. I fumble through the games inefficiently and slowly same as I did in the 90s.

sylens• 5 months ago

The romhacks are definitely the way to go. I don't need much in terms of gameplay mechanics besides Gen 3 or Gen 4, what I do need is interesting and challenging dungeons/gauntlets

jtbayly• 5 months ago

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.

NewJazz• 5 months ago

Maybe complain to the council and ask them to remove the pokestop if people keep doing this.

asdff4• 5 months ago

You should have seen it when pokemon go came out

MPSimmons• 5 months ago

I'm part of a pokemon go community, and the only time we ever do car raids is when the weather is terrible or freezing. What was the weather like?

averynicepen• 5 months ago

It's usually not a question of laziness, but just path optimization. For big raid events, limited only to a few hours, Pokemon Go players will do whatever gets them to the most raids in that fixed amount of time. In places where the gyms are well placed in walkable parks, there are enough gyms that are close enough so that you can loop through the park, giving the system time to spawn new raids in the first gyms you already raided. Doing raids walking is actually preferable to driving, because in order to take down raid Pokemon, you also need a big enough raid party, and that's easier to judge with a crowd of people who agree to go in the same direction, instead of mystery players in mystery cars.

But in SO many places in the US, the gyms just aren't close enough. It's both a fault of the urban environment and the game system, but it just frequently creates situations where if you want to catch a time-limited raid Pokemon that's shiny or has high stats, driving is often the only way to play in your area.

What's funny though is that car or not, there are lots of Pokemon Go events where people don't talk to anybody. It's just a bunch of people who show up to the same spot, nod hey at each other, and then tap away on their phones in awkward proximity. Many people just have the personality type that drives them to solely play single player games, and there's no amount of game design that will push them to socialize.

But it varies - that's what it was like on my university campus, but I've also been to park events where the age range and social friendliness is extremely varied and wonderful. It is a fascinating and unexpected community.

haunter3• 5 months ago

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.

basch2• 5 months ago

Their extended popularity should be viewed closer to praying on addiction than an accomplishment of culture. The phone game, by removing the exploration of outside aspect, became just mindless collecting. If you have ever been to an event as an outside spectator, there is as much anxiety in their air as joy.

Pack opening is the equivalent of pulltabs or scratch offs. It's an asset class closer to beanie babies than baseball cards, because there is no tie to a rookie going on to have a huge career or anything but artificial scarcity.

pixl97• 5 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_card

Addiction has always been a component here.

ohhnoodont• 5 months ago

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.

alexpotato2• 5 months ago

But today I sometimes feel like our culture is locked in time.

People say this often and I agree that it does feel that way.

They particularly underline "they are constantly remaking old movies!" which is also true.

However, this is not a new phenomenon. As someone who loves movie trivia, IMDB is full of "this 1980s film was actually a remake of this other 1947 film". An older example: the Victorians (~1837 - ~1901) were obsessed with the ancient Romans. This was during a time when the telegraph was connecting the world and people could talk to humans, instantly, on the other side of the world.

bubblewand3• 5 months ago

The Wizard of Oz (the one you know of) was a remake.

The Thing (the one you know of—though the other had a longer title anyway) was a remake.

The version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland (so, the one with that meme-able image of him pointing toward the camera) was a remake.

(Franchises? There are some from like the 40s that had a dozen or so entries over the next couple decades)

Many remake examples from almost all periods of filmmaking.

There were tons of remakes of silent films after talkies came about, then another wave of remakes of jankier-effects stagier-acting-style movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s when effects got way better and naturalistic acting took over in the 70s (plus some of these were remaking black & white to color).

kevinsync• 5 months ago

Scarface! [0] We all think Tony Montana, but back in 1932 it was Tony Camonte.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarface_(1932_film)

asdff4• 5 months ago

I was just thinking too when there are new IPs, they are completely indistinct today. Take a character from any of the past 15 years of animated movies and they are interchangeable with each other. Everyone is afraid to establish a design language beyond looking kinda-sorta like a pixar character.

90s were so different with creative freedom with the media we were exposed to. All those shows had their own art style. Characters were distinct and unmistakable. Brands were cemented as a result.

Marketing executives have lost the hat. They are like those people from the Neutral Planet in Futurama. Somehow they reigned in everything that made them successful in the 80s and 90s.

specialist2• 5 months ago

I believe, but cannot prove, new media(s) enable new waves of creativity.

(Orthogonal to the socioeconomic incubators.)

haunter3• 5 months ago

Take a character from any of the past 15 years of animated movies and they are interchangeable with each other

That's mostly an american thing

You should watch some anime

yifanl2• 5 months ago

I walk past something resembling a claw machine arcade on my commute, and I've noticed that although every month the prizes in the window swap around, the anime woman figurine and the mascot plush always looks quite similar to the one from the last month.

I _think_ they're from different series, but aesthetically it's impossible for me to figure out one from the other. Trends are still changing, but I think our design sensibilities have definitely found a place to plateau.

specialist2• 5 months ago

I've come full circle to appreciating the current durability of culture.

Last summer, I played Pokémon with my neice's kid. I got to relive the pure joy of playing Pokémon with my neice, nephews, and own son. So now three generations are nerding out together. I love it.

brailsafe• 5 months ago

Eh, how long has looney tunes and Bugs Bunny been around? I was watching that with my silent generation grandfather into the 2000s, and my first video games were basically my Gen X dad's first video games on the 2600 and first Nintendo, Intellivision. I think the simplicity of those games and that IP is just universally approachable for people at a certain age. Before Pokemon cards, it was just sports cards for ages.

diogenescynic• 5 months ago

It’s not just video games but everything… movies, music, everything has basically barely evolved compared to the prior 30 years. Compare 1965 to 1995 and 1995 to present and it’s so clear we have become stagnant in so many ways. Way fewer choices in a lot of ways even if we have more convenient options.

runamuck• 5 months ago

I try to (relive my youth and) buy my kids action figures and they could care less. Injection molded plastic hunks can't compete with the dopamine hit of Roblox or Dogman books.

popalchemist2• 5 months ago

While there IS innovation and novelty in the toy industry, I can tell you from experience in the field that the people with the money are the parents. So the nostalgia play is a very strong tactic. Sell what the parents had because they will INSTANTLY want to give the same to their kids.

tayo42• 5 months ago

I get the logic, I didn't grow up with my parents youth culture though.

dfxm12• 5 months ago

Not exactly Pokemon related, but this would have been the coolest toy I had for a while if I had it 30 years ago.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVXryEIj8ah/?igsh=MWViMDBvZ3h...

bombcar3• 5 months ago

"Block" games existed in the 90s, perhaps, but Minecraft is from 2009.

"Factorio" type puzzles may have existed, but nothing of that detail until 2016.

Part of the big advancements of the 80-90s was that the technology was advancing insanely quickly, which meant that things that were simply impossible a year ago were commonplace next year.

LEGO still exists, but the Lego of 2026 is not the Lego of the 90s (for good or ill).

Toy cars existed in the 80s, but the Cars franchise started in 2006.

Part of the problem is it's hard to see what will be huge in 20 years that already exists today.

You also have "sideways cannibalization" where something in one area never really expands to another: Harvest Moon never moved to PC/Mac and so there was an opening that Stardew Valley took advantage of, and now has moved way beyond. In a way it's "the same thing locked in time" in another it's not.

What do they say about there being only seven stories?

atomicnumber3• 5 months ago

"Harvest Moon never moved to PC/Mac"

That's not the opening that Stardew took. It was only on PC because that's the platform that doesn't make you fill out an application to get dev hardware for.

The opening they took was Harvest Moon putting out increasingly uninnovative game after increasingly uninnovative game for years. Rune Factory innovated exactly once and then swore never to do so again (though they managed to produce RF4 so I do give them props for that. even if RF5 walked it so far back.)

Something about these games is very hard to pin down. See also: the millions of SDV clones, some even by huge players with lots of money, that don't make any kind of cultural dent.

mmooss• 5 months ago

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.)

relwin• 5 months ago

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

backscratches• 5 months ago

The coolest hacker-esque Pokémon ROM I've seen is InfiniteFusion [1]. Let's you combine Pokémon into original "fusions", in other words, there are over 200,000 Pokémon. Impressively well done and very fun with lots of user accessible settings like difficulty and degree of randomness. For example, this is the sprite you see in game if you have Blastizard aka Blastoise/Charizard fusion: https://www.fusiondex.org/blastoise+charizard/

[1] https://infinitefusion.fandom.com/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Infinite...

shnpln• 5 months ago

I am in my 30s, my wife and I enjoy collecting the cards still. We go to conventions and try to track down cool cards and trade for them. It is a fun side hobby that we do from time to time to get out of the house and meet new people. I have long since lost my love for the games, and I don't particularly care about the rarest cards. I just like tracking down cards that look cool to me and meeting people along the way.

orwin• 5 months ago

I think the main story quality definitely decreased since black/white 2, but the ideas are there. And they streamlined the game enough that ev grinding isn't as painful, and breeding less random.

To be really short: I think the solo games are slightly worse overall, but the multiplayer VCG is in the best state it ever was. They have tournaments with 5k people.

999900000999• 5 months ago

I want a Pokémon game where you’re 40. As if you’re Red from the original game.

Pokémon Mortgage edition

3eb7988a1663• 5 months ago

You reminded me of this VGCats comic https://vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=258

ebbi• 5 months ago

Maybe it's just my age, or bias driven by nostalgia, but I'm not a huge fan of recent Pokemon production - I feel the Pokemon creations themselves feel quite forced. But thinking back to Red/Blue days, and the OG Pokemon, that will always bring back good memories and nostalgia.

zadikian• 5 months ago

Pretty sure gen 1 is inherently better IP and it's not a nostalgia thing. The only Pokemon I played was half of Crystal on a jailbroken iPhone as a kid.

password54321• 5 months ago

Pokemon isn't entirely unique. A lot of things from the 90s are still popular because it is from a time before Israel plunged the world into madness. Culturally, things have dramatically stagnated ever since.

Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit

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