Even After 30 Years, Pokémon Is Still Reinventing Play

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February marked 30 years since the release of Pokémon Red Version and Pokémon Green Version in 1996. What began as a video game has grown into a global franchise with few rivals. Built around its games, Pokémon has expanded into television, trading cards, and a wide range of other media. It is now also taking on broader social roles, including children's education.

Tsunekazu Ishihara, president of The Pokémon Company, which oversees the brand, says the aim is "to broaden the possibilities of play by bringing the virtual and real worlds closer together."

A New Kind of Play

Ishihara said the idea was driven by one belief: "If we could make it work, it would create a form of play unlike anything people had seen before."

What Red and Green aimed to do was let players use the Game Boy, Nintendo's handheld game console, and its link cable to trade pokémon they had each caught, creating a style of play where the virtual and real worlds met. Technical problems, however, stretched development to six years, far beyond the roughly six months to one year that was standard at the time. By the time the games were released, the Game Boy was already past its prime.

A major boost came from a campaign in CoroCoro Comic, a popular Japanese children's manga magazine. The magazine offered readers a chance to get Mew, a hidden pokémon that existed in the game's data but could not be obtained through normal play. The promotion sparked intense interest among children and helped fuel word-of-mouth excitement.

Breaking Out Beyond the Game

Reflecting on the period, Ishihara says, "People call it a successful example of media-mix expansion, but it wasn't as if we had a meticulously crafted brand strategy from the outset."

He later came to believe that "if play is not confined to the screen but combined with physical action, it can generate much broader growth."

That idea led to the launch of the Pokémon Trading Card Game, a real-world extension of the virtual game universe. It let players take the experience off the screen and into their hands. The anime and films soon followed.

Ishihara says Pokémon's leap onto the world stage came at two major turning points.

The first came when Pokémon expanded into the United States. There, a strategy opposite to the one used in Japan worked well.

"We led with the anime to build name recognition, then rolled out the games and cards," he explains. That approach helped establish Pokémon as a global phenomenon.

The second turning point was the release of Pokémon GO, a game which combined smartphone GPS technology with Pokémon's familiar appeal of searching for and catching pokémon. Players could find pokémon on a real-world map and catch them by throwing balls on screen. It was a breakthrough moment. For the first time, technology made it feel as if Pokémon had crossed over from the virtual into the real.

What's Next

That blending of the real and the imagined is now being accepted naturally in other settings as well. One example is the Pokémon Fossil Museum, a special exhibition that compares real fossils and prehistoric life with fossil pokémon.

"At first, there were concerns that children might get confused," Ishihara says. "But children are not so foolish, and researchers found it engaging as well. In truth, there may be no need to separate the real and the virtual so rigidly."

As technology advances, Ishihara expects pokémon to be portrayed in increasingly lifelike ways and integrated more deeply into real-world settings.

"What we do will not change. Games remain at the core, and the key is giving people something they want to play," he says. "What matters is not whether something is virtual or real, but how far we can expand the experience."

Evolving from Cult Favorite to Mainstream

Hisakazu Hirabayashi, a game analyst, says what sets Pokémon apart from other major game franchises, such as Mario and Dragon Quest, is its sense of continuity with the real world.

Where the latter two depict adventures in entirely fictional realms, Pokémon is clearly modeled on reality. That worldview has helped Pokémon expand far beyond video games. It created room for projects in very different fields.

One example is the Pokémon X KOGEI exhibition, which brought the franchise together with traditional Japanese craftsmanship. Another is Pokémon Local Acts, a regional revitalization initiative.

Hirabayashi argues that early pokémon were not simply cute. Beneath the surface was a slightly strange and unsettling sensibility, shaped in part by the US director Todd Browning's 1932 cult film Freaks and ideas such as mutation.

Over time, though, that edge was softened and refined into something more widely accessible. That helped Pokémon build a wholesome image while also strengthening the emotional attachment people feel toward it.

The explosive success of the latest game title, Pokémon Pokopoia, released on March 5, can also be seen as the payoff from that long strategy. In the game, set in a desolate world, pokémon are depicted as "neighbors" that live alongside the player.

At its core, Pokémon has taken a sharp, once-niche sensibility and expanded it into a major form of entertainment that almost anyone can enjoy.

(Read the article in Japanese.)

Author: Rei Miyake, The Sankei Shimbun

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