[57] Pokemon: Fad That Never Fades
GM Readers!
Hope you enjoyed the (long) weekend!
I’ve been exploring metas, zeitgeists and culture. One thing top of mind is how does something achieve lasting cultural iconic status. To unpack, let’s look at the Pokemon Universe as a case study.
Hope you enjoy the long read!
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Building Blocks:
🎨 Life in Color Relevant Essays: [The Checks Meta] + [We Love SubCulture] + [Stories: The OG Human Innovation] + [Infinite Design Space]
“Put your Poke-MAN cards away and get ready for your next class, or I am going to confiscate your Poke-MAN cards…” the school aide said as she tried to usher hundreds of young kids to wrap up their lunch period.
Of course, as a young kid in said cafeteria, I laughed and told my friends, “she said Poke-MAN … it’s Poke-mon.” 🤦
Pokemon arrived in the US in 1998 and took the world by storm.
By some estimates, the Pokemon franchise is the most successful IP / media franchise in history.
It’s a $90Bn+ franchise (probably closer to $100Bn today… see the graphic below.)
Other sources might have different numbers but Pokemon still tops those lists. (See Wikipedia’s: List of highest grossing media IPs here.)
Pokemon beats out other historic and blue chip franchises like Hello Kitty, Star Wars, and Harry Potter.
What has made Pokemon successful?
🤔
💡Satoshi Tajiri invents Pocket Monsters
Pocket Monsters (Pokemon) was invented by Satoshi Tajiri, the president of a company called Game Freak in 1996. The concept was inspired by Satoshi’s childhood. He envisioned it as a monster-catching game with magical monsters that had a variety of traits (type, strength, species, etc). In 1996, Nintendo invested in the concept and became the publisher for the Pokemon video games, and launched Pokemon Red, Green and Blue Versions for GameBoy in Japan.
Months after the launch of the game, a company called Creatures, teamed up with Nintendo to launch the trading card game. With the positive initial reception, in 1997, a Pokemon anime / show was launched. The initial success of the franchise led to a wave of toys and comics being introduced to the market through licensed manufacturers.
In just two years, Pokemon went from concept to an IP universe with multiple products (video game, trading card game, anime and merchandise).
The launch of Pocket Monsters (Pokemon) in Japan was nothing short of a success. The Pokemon game sold 1M+ units at launch and another ~4M units the following year in Japan, making it the best-selling game in Japan at the time.
🧭 Journey to the West
Al Kahn, the founder of 4Kids entertainment, visited Japan and became enamored with the obsession of Pokemon in Japan. 4Kids entertainment acquired, produced, and licensed children’s entertainment. Kahn paid $2.5M for the worldwide rights to Pokemon outside of Asia. After acquiring the rights, Kahn meticulously focused on every part of the launch strategy for the US. While Kahn saw promise in the Pokemon franchise from his visit to Japan, Pokemon as a concept (from anime, art style, to cultural sub-texts) was entirely new to the US.
Bringing Pokemon to the US was not a simple “copy and paste” strategy. Across the product suite, different details were changed / adapted for a US audience.
For the trading card game, Kahn signed a deal with Wizards of the Coast to produce the English version of the Pokemon cards. Wizards of the Coast started the iconic card game, Magic the Gathering.
The anime was adapted to a US audience with 4Kids Entertainment (Kahn’s company) leading the charge. Kahn saw 4Kids Entertainment as a company that produced children’s TV shows to "support toys, that [the tv shows] were basically 22-minute commercials [for the toys]." The show’s main character, Satoshi, (named after its inventor), was renamed to Ash. Initially the Pokemon TV show was met with resistance from American TV networks – they were hesitant to air a show with characters that looked largely unrecognizable to a US audience.
For merchandise, Kahn signed another blue chip partner, Hasbro, to manufacture the Pokemon toys.
Kahn teamed up with Nintendo of America to bring the Pokemon game to the US. While the video game was largely kept the same, the name was changed from Pocket Monsters to Pokemon.
All of this vastly increased Pokemon’s importability to the US and its overall success.
Launch Campaign: Pikachu Airdrop
On top of all of that, Pokemon needed to make a splash in the US if it wanted to capture widespread attention.
Promotional tapes of Pokemon were mailed to Nintendo’s mailing list. The tape introduced the Pokemon concept and featured a variety of different Pokemon products. The video ended by telling viewers to look out for the “PokeCars,” (retrofitted cars that look like Pikachu) that was going to drive around the country to give out free Pokemon stuff.
The most interesting part of the launch involved the town of Topeka, Kansas.
In August 1999, at a field in Topeka, 10 skydivers along with 700 Pikachu Plush Dolls airdropped onto the field for kids to pick up and claim. The skydivers drove off in the PokeCars to begin their cross country evangelism campaign.
The city of Topeka agreed to be renamed to “ToPikachu” for a day.
Pokemon’s Success
The launch of Pokemon was only the beginning of the craze. Kids became instantly obsessed.
In 1999, Lycos (search engine) debuted a list of the top 50 search queries, Pokemon was #1 and stayed #1 for the next year.
Riding the momentum, the first US Pokemon Movie, “Mewtwo Strikes Back,” was released on a Wednesday in November 1999. Kids across the US called out “sick” from school to go watch the movie. There was no way you wanted to miss this for yet another school day. These absences became known as the “Pokeflu.”
Pokemon captured so much attention that even counterfeiters wanted a piece of the action: in 1999, Customs officials confiscated $20M+ of Pokemon merchandise.
By the end of 1999, Pokemon sold $7Bn of products worldwide. It was the fastest selling title in Game Boy’s 10-year history then.
🎡 Pokemon: Integrated Universe
Everything throughout the Pokemon universe was based on its slogan: Gotta Catch 'Em All.
It’s a simple, yet powerful and timeless concept: collecting.
Meta Protocol: Collect It All
Everything in the Pokemon universe is structured around the idea of collecting.
Collecting is one of the oldest human behaviors and dates back to ancient history / early civilizations.
Collecting is powerful for a few different reasons:
Ownership: Feeling of ownership over the things we collect. We value the things we own over the things we don’t.
Community / social: A community forms around the thing we are collecting, either with other collectors or fans. As the initial community scales, more people want to join, either because they are interested / want to contribute or because they don’t want to miss out.
Signaling / Status: Positional scarcity … we want to collect the things that other people collect, and we gain status amongst the community for collecting something rare.
Thrill: Thrill from collecting something rare or from the lengths we have to go through to collect something we want. The process and feeling we have toward collecting make the things we collect more valuable.
Every core product reinforces the idea of “Gotta Catch ‘Em All”.
Video Game: a “role-playing” (RPG) adventure game that centers around a player catching and training Pokemon.
👉 Collecting Pokemon in Digital Medium
Trading Card Game: card game that featured Pokemon from the games and show.
👉 Collecting Pokemon in Physical Medium
Anime / Show: the whole arc of the show is about an adventure where the main purpose is to collect and train Pokemon with your friends.
👉 Education / Story / Lore about collecting Pokemon
While collecting is a part of a lot of other popular products / subcultures, the core products in the Pokemon universe reinforce each other around the concept of collecting.
For example: The show featured Charizard in the storyline as Ash’s only starting Pokemon to evolve to its final form. The show and story built fandom around Charizard. Because of this fandom, inevitably fans would want to collect the Charizard card IRL.
The Charizard card is an extremely rare card (read: scarce). A 1999 edition Charizard card sold for ~$420K.
The incentive design to collecting Pokemon strikes a balance between easy to get started and build momentum but not so easy that everyone can collect all Pokemon without trying. It is fun for the average person, but there is value in being the best / top collector.
Collecting in Pokemon feels like a never ending thing, but because it was designed to be fun, approachable and more importantly social… it has staying power.
Community: Social and Inclusive
The Pokemon Universe was designed to be social.
Single Player mode is okay… but multiplayer mode is infinitely better.
Pokemon landed amongst kids who naturally have a community at school.
When I was younger, almost everyone at school cared about Pokemon. If you weren't involved in Pokemon, you weren’t a part of the zeitgeist.
You weren’t cool.
Even if you didn’t care about Pokemon, you had to face the fact that almost everybody else around you did — which encourages you to participate at some level.
Encouraging social behavior was inherent in its products.
For example: The main difference between the various versions of the Pokemon games was which Pokemon was available in which game. That means to “Catch ‘em All,” you had to trade the Pokemon in your game with others. So if I had Pokemon Red version, the only way I could “Catch ‘em All” was to trade for the Pokemon that was exclusive to the Blue version. On top of this, there were also Pokemon that you could only get at special events IRL.
To trade Pokemon across games, you needed a link cable to link two Game Boy systems together.
I remember on a school field trip, only one kid had a link cable. He became the most popular kid on that class trip. He was offered snacks, Pokemon cards, friendship and everything middle schoolers cared about just to use his link cable. I can’t remember what that field trip was about, all I remember was that I was a step closer that day to “catching em’ all,” because he let me borrow his link cable.
The social elements of Pokemon span beyond just any one product.
The Pokemon universe allows many different types of people to get involved. With multiple entry points … you can:
Play the video games
Collect the trading cards
Buy merchandise (Pokemon sneakers, bookbag, clothing, etc)
Watch the TV shows (Saturday morning Pokemon episodes was a ritual for many people)
Outside of the the products, the Pokemon IP was also expansive, which makes it more inclusive — something for everyone.
The original Pokemon series had 151 Pokemon, all with different art, traits, evolution, colors, etc. Whether you were an enthusiast, a gamer, an observer or a parent of Pokemon fanatics, there was likely something for you.
For example: if you like “cute”, then you might resonate with Pikachu or Jigglypuff.
This creates the opportunity for subcultures (defined by interests and preferences) to exist within the broader Pokemon universe.
All this social behavior coupled with “there is something for everyone,” create network effects that grow the broader community.
The Craft of Product Building
Outside of the design (collecting) and reinforcing social behavior (community), the Pokemon products are meticulously built.
Every element/detail behind the Pokemon products was treated like a craft.
For example: let’s take a look at the music behind the video games.
All the fans who played the Gameboy Pokemon games will recognize its music. The variety of tunes throughout the game matches perfectly with the emotion that part of the game was trying to evoke.
This is to the credit of Junichi Masuda, a cofounder of Game Freak.
Masuda wanted to “use the music to build something distinct that felt like the real world.” The Pokemon music subculture is so strong, that a student from Brown University, named Mark Benis, wrote a 173 page thesis analyzing the music.
Some of the takeaways: “relief is perhaps the strongest emotion that the player feels after capturing a Pokémon, especially if it is rare or even legendary…”
Even to write the thesis was a labor of love – which required breaking down the music and converting Gameboy audio files into something that can be analyzed. To compose the music with the constraints of the Gameboy was bigger feat. “It’s almost like a puzzle. I think of Junichi Masuda as a really good puzzle maker.”
For the uninitiated, listen to clip of the music: here.
“I tend to focus on the target audience of each game when coming up with the music and sometimes that does mean appealing to player nostalgia,” Masuda says. “In the upcoming Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! I envisioned that players would be enjoying the games in their living rooms beside their friends and family, so I used more orchestral-sounding music in order to make less intimidating than, say, rock music or techno music, which can be quite polarizing.” – Masuda
🌌 Nurturing the Pokemon Universe
IP Universe Network Effects
There is a difference between building a product versus building a universe. Good products come and go, but good universes are timeless.
IP Universes are about stories — stories about characters, culture, societies, worlds and everything in between.
Unlike products, IP universes aren’t rooted in utility. For a product: when a better product comes along, we adopt the new product because it’s more useful than the old product.
Stories are different. There is no utility framework. Stories die when we stop giving attention to them.
But great stories and IP can last for generations if not longer.
The Pokemon universe started with a video game, anime/show and card game. Since then it’s expanded.
All new products / efforts are focused on a few areas:
Create new IP: There are now over 1,000 Pokemon across many shows, video games, cards, etc.
Remix existing IP: Pikachu got its own movie in 2019, called Detective Pikachu.
Introduce New Product Categories: Niantic in partnership with Nintendo and the Pokemon Company, launched Pokemon GO, a mixed AR mobile game in 2016.
Adding more to the universe strengths the flywheel and gives it more ways to spin: more content, more ways to participate, more sub-cultures — more ways to “catch ‘em all.”
All this comes together and looks something like this👇
Sustaining an IP Universe
As I covered in the Checks Meta essay … most metas don’t achieve cultural iconic status because the hype fades before enough casual fans convert to super fans.
When Pokemon GO launched in 2016, everyone was dismissing it as a fad. Here are some stats of this “fad”:
In 2021, Pokemon GO had 71M active players (down from 2016) and generated $1.2Bn in revenue (up from 2016). Pokemon GO players walked ~4.3 billion miles in 2021 — about 60 miles per active user. The app was downloaded more than 1 billion times.
For a fad, it’s not doing bad at all… and remember in 2021, we were still in a global pandemic.
Pokemon GO is another example of reframing and reimagining the collecting behavior but with upgraded tech.
Card Game: collect something physical
Video Game: collect something digital
Pokemon GO: collect something in a mixed reality world (Physical x Digital)
If 2016 feels too outdated, a more recent example is the latest iteration of the Pokemon video games: Scarlet and Violet, which was launched in November 2022.
In just 6 weeks after launch, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet became the 4th best selling Pokemon game of all time.
All in all, as of March 2022, the Pokémon franchise has sold over 440 million copies of its games worldwide. This makes Pokémon the second best-selling game franchise, only behind Super Mario.
What makes the Pokemon IP remarkable is its ability to stand the test of time through new products that introduce novelty but preserve the timeless aspects that fans love.
⏳Lindy Culture: The Test of Time
The Lindy Effect: “theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age…”
Basically, if something has survived for x-years, it will be around for another x-years.
Pokemon has been around for 27 years.
What reinforces the Lindy Effect for Pokemon?
In short:
Top tier quality across its entire universe (products, partnerships, execution, story/lore, etc) combined with
Compounding network effects across different aspects of its universe that reinforce each other (community, fandom, products, design, etc).
It looks something like this👇 (note: not exhaustive) 🎡
Will it stand the test of time?
What Pokemon has going for it is a long standing line of successful products couple with a large community / fan base. Even if it occasionally launches a product that flops, that one flop is not enough to unwind all the network effects and compounding from its IP universe.
And because of its success, it can experiment and explore more ways to bring Pokemon to life — especially in light of emerging tech (AI, AR/VR, Web3, etc).
Pokemon invented a culture.
Culture thrives on attention.
Attention begets more attention.
To some Pokemon might be a fad, but it might be the fad that never fades.