How did Pokémon become a global phenomenon?

Pokémon began as a small Game Boy project in Japan and spread through playground word of mouth. Its design encouraged trading and connection, and the company then rolled out the anime, trading cards and games as linked products, first in the United States and then elsewhere. By the early 2000s the result was a social phenomenon nicknamed "Pokémania". [1] [2]

Creator Satoshi Tajiri, a keen insect collector, conceived the idea of collecting "pocket monsters" in 1990, after seeing the Game Boy link cable. A Smithsonian curator says Tajiri pictured bugs crawling from one Game Boy to the next, and wanted a social experience. Pokémon Red and Green were released in Japan on 27 February 1996. Accounts of development time differ: the Smithsonian says six years, while a developer quoted by the BBC says about seven. [1] [2]

Expectations were low. The Game Boy was seen as aging hardware, and the Smithsonian's curator calls the release an underdog. The developer Mr Ishihara expected perhaps a million copies of each version and says selling abroad was never considered. Word of mouth on Japanese playgrounds, helped by cheaper Game Boys, drove its rise. [1] [2]

The Guardian points to the games being released in pairs, with different monsters in each version. Completing the Pokédex meant trading with friends, so the link cable, used for competition in Tetris, was used for connection. Manga, trading cards and anime followed within a year in Japan, which helped persuade Nintendo to look westward. [3] [1]

The Pokémon Company says it worried that American audiences might dislike a role-playing game requiring a lot of reading, so it introduced Pokémon through a televised anime first, reversing the Japanese order of game, cards, then anime. Mr Ishihara recalls people saying American children would not play a text-heavy, turn-based game. The anime aired in the US in September 1998, about two weeks before the games, and Pokémon Red and Blue reached North America in 1998 and Europe in 1999. Mr Ishihara believes the lengthy translation process and the anime's hype fed demand for the games and a newly launched card game. The author Daniel Dockery, quoted by Smithsonian Magazine, adds that Pokémon excels at advertising all its media together and centering them on collecting. The company then expanded to Europe, Latin America, Oceania and Asia, and the anime was translated into over 30 languages. [4] [2] [1] [5]

At its height, Pokémania led religious leaders in Saudi Arabia to ban Pokémon, and Western media ran stories about card-related crime. A Duke University Press book description says the craze was mostly over by 2002, though CNN notes a revival after 2016 linked to Pokémon Go and the Detective Pikachu film. CNN also credits the characters themselves, which were universal enough to cross cultures yet varied enough to make collecting a challenge. [2] [6] [5]