Before being quizzed on Jigglypuff’s evolution during a Tuesday night Hebrew school class, I was under the illusion that my schoolyard was the trendiest in the world, the only place Pokemon had hit. There was no way to tell if my recesses were the only ones on the planet where kids flicked Crazy Bones.
I was of a generation hustled between fads. Spice Girls, Animorphs and Power Rangers took stage, giving kiddos something to obsess over for a season and leave parents exhausted, and lighter in the wallets. From a distance, Pokemon seemed to be another flash-in-the-pan when it landed in 1996. From mainstream news to South Park, every grown spectator logically assumed that Nintendo’s craze would exit as quickly as it entered, just like the rest.
It’s approaching a lifespan of two decades. With Pokemon X/Y out this week, there are now 718 Pokemon. I still haven’t caught em all. I’m not even close.
At the core of all 90s fads was the idea of an incremental commodity. Buy, own, collect, trade, complete, be satisfied. You couldn’t just have one Goosebumps book, you needed them in a gooey neon coloured row, ordered by spine number. Pogs, cut out circles of cardboard stamped with photos of NHL hockey players or illustrations of Todd MacFarlane’s Spawn, could have gone on indefinitely if kids had the attention spans.
But where devil sticks and other such novelties now clutter up basement bins, Pokemon beat the algorithm, becoming an evergreen property. What bought Pokemon immortality – as a video game, a trading card game, and a phenomenon – was that it was the product all other fads were training youngsters to obsess over.
Buy, own, collect, trade, complete and be satisfied isn’t only how you participated in the Pokemon frenzy, it’s also how you played the very video game. It was a game that played like being a kid at that time, thought it was actually about its creator’s youth.
It’s shocking how close Nintendo came to scrapping their Pokemon. Satoshi Taijiri’, the game creator, based it on his childhood hobby of catching insects in tall grass and rivers. When Taijiri presented the interactive interpretation of his passion, Nintendo was confused.
Ambition aside, it didn’t help that he proposed it for the Game Boy, a system not as relevant as Nintendo’s home console, though the company’s only machine capable of linking together separate units. Not to mention that, other than Final Fantasy, there really weren’t many commercially successful role-playing games in North America. “At first Pokemon was just an idea, and nothing happened,” Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto told TIME Magazine.
The game took six years and nearly destroyed Taijiri’s studio, Game Freak. By release, children had been obsessively accumulating for fun, and suddenly there was an entire video game devoted to the practice. It was the game every kid was already playing.
By the time a teaching assistant gave me a yellow promotional tape, which was mostly about merchandising, Pikachu and the other battle critters had already infested the schoolyard. Bootleg strategy guides were sacredly passed around like bibles. Lunch hour was a Pidgeotto drawing contest. My mom played nice while my little brother marched around a Toys R’ Us in a parade with other kids, instructed to cheer “We like Pokemon.” Pokemon card bannings became an epidemic. Looney Tunes got in on the rip-off train.
To just say that Pokemon was nothing more than a fluke fad overlooks what a complicated monster Nintendo plopped into the pockets of kids everywhere. Devious salesmanship, sure, but it wasn’t just throwing plastic and cardboard bits at other plastic, cardboard bits. RPGs were hard sell American underdogs: they’re slow on the action and loaded with strategy. In Pokemon, the credits don’t roll when you finally have em all. The game’s only done when you beat the region’s best trainers using a team you devoted days of your life crafting.
Millennial gamers never really got over their completist impulses. In-game achievements on all modern platforms pander to people who need to collect every badge, every reaffirmation of satisfaction. Even if there are fewer straight-up Pokemon rip-offs, there’s still tons of influence.
Pokemon X/Y seems in many ways tailored for Generation Y. It’s in full 3D, something we begged to see on the N64. And while the three starters are different, you are abruptly offered one of the original three – Charmander, Squirtle, Bulbasaur – shortly in. If you had moved on from the franchise, Nintendo offers you a way back in, reacquainting you with your nostalgia and virtual OCD. It’s the fad you can return to, the fad that’s not really a fad at all.
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CORRECTION (10/17/2013, 11:18 AM): An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the Pokemon character Bulbasaur as “Bublasaur.” We regret the error and apologize to Bulbasaurs everywhere.
