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Home Page > Pokemon : Pokemon History - The Red Blimp

How Pokemon became a phenomenon

The origin of Pokemon, as an idea, is well-known among fans: Satoshi Tajiri loved collecting bugs as a child, and he once he saw many of the woods he knew become paved for streets and such, he thought about a way for city kids to collect bugs, too.

It is less known, however, how he came to pick the Gameboy as his platform. I’ve read that Satoshi got the idea to use the Gameboy upon seeing the link cables. He imagined bugs crawling up and down the cables, and from there the idea of Pokemon solidified a bit more.

I once read on a now-defunct website that Satoshi had originally planned thousands of Pokemon, the majority of them based on bugs. Supposedly, Pokemon was also envisioned as a bug catching manga. This idea never took off; perhaps Sugimori persuaded him to go with a wider variety of animals? I read this information in 2002, so if anyone has any sources related to this, please contact me so that this issue may be cleared up.

Even less known are the specifics concerning the Pokemon phenomenon. Most Pokemon fans in the United States can say that it was the huge marketing campaign as well as the tight gameplay that made it a success in the US, while others can trace it back further to Japan and say that it became a huge fad. This article will attempt to go as far back as possible to document the beginnings of what would become the Pokemon Phenomenon.

Satoshi loved video games as a child. He was such a huge lover of games that a local arcade let him take home a Space Invaders machine. Now that’s devotion! He began a magazine called GameFREAK with tips on beating games and such.

From what I recall from other sources, Satoshi presented the idea to someone at Nintendo. The executives were not particularly excited. They thought that it was a risky idea and not certain it would work out. He convinced them to try. Work thence began on Pokemon Red and Green.

According to this site, the games were not initially successful. It was through word of mouth that Pokemon Red and Green became popular. I’ve read in more than one site that it was the success of Pokemon Red and Blue which saved the Gameboy from being a dead console.

Seeing this, NCL (Nintendo Company Limited, the Japanese Nintendo) thought about translating the game and releasing it in the United States. NoA (Nintendo of America) was skeptical; Gail Tilden of Nintendo America said that even though everyone acknowledged that Pokemon was "brilliant game design, we did not know how much of a mass market it would be." They decided to take the risk of running with a Japanese product.

Of course, NoA being NoA, there was marketing involved. Plenty of planning went into the release of Pokemon Red and Blue; the anime was planned to broadcast soon after the game was released. There was worry; Japanese RPGs had not done well in the United States before (an example of this would be Earth Bound 0 and EarthBound – see this page). NoA therefore needed all the experience they had from the Japanese audience to be able to properly market this. The anime was handled by 4Kids, and was changed to be an “American cartoon for American kids”, much to the dismay of future fans. Everything was taken into account: voice acting, how to translate the names, which Pokemon might be the most popular (the sales team at NoA predicted that American kids would prefer cool Pokemon to cute ones, and so thought that Meowth might be the Pokemon to rival Pikachu in popularity).

The problem, after that, was marketing the anime. NoA knew that having a TV show would definitely help kids relate to the characters in the game more, and so they pushed for stations to air the show. Many TV networks were skeptical; what was this weird Japanese cartoon doing here? Those that accepted Pokemon often gave it an undesirable time slot. Disregarding these issues, 4Kids announced that the syndication offer was successful.

The drama would begin anew, however, with the Electric Soldier Porygon incident.

Most Pokemon fans can tell you about that fateful episode: there was a part where Pikachu used thunderbolts on some missiles and caused some lights to flash. At this part, kids in Japan began to feel sick. Many were rushed to the hospital. The issue was so serious that the Pokemon anime was put on hiatus in Japan until April. It is suspected that photosensitive epilepsy was to blame for the reactions, but some sources claim that mass hysteria was to blame (some things to take into account was that rapidly flashing lights had been used in anime for years before that, and they blinked much faster and with brighter colors. The Porygon episode’s lights were benign compared to some anime of that time).

In any case, the United States media pounced on the opportunity to portray Pokemon as demonic and malicious, painting the show as if it were intended to give people seizures: USA TODAY (1997, December 31): "Pokemon, the flashing, frenetic cartoon that triggered convulsions and vomiting in hundreds of Japanese children, may air in the USA next fall." Keveney (1998, March 1): "Coming this fall to a TV set near you--the show that felled several hundred kids.”

4Kids immediately began preaching about the importance of safety, how all blinking lights would be edited to prevent something else like this happening. However, the damage was done. You can still find people nowadays which refer to Pokemon as “the seizure cartoon” (though as time passes, they become harder to find).

The issue, then became about marketing. Nintendo started a huge marketing campaign, keeping the holiday season in mind. Few companies were interested in Pokemon at first, but as its popularity grew more and more companies became licensees.

The Pokemon anime debuted in the U.S. on September 9, 1998 and Red and Blue were released on September 28, 1998.

The show and game were a huge success. Although parents were a little wary about the series, the children absolutely loved it. Hasbro was unable to meet demand for Pokemon toys. When the Trading Card Game (TCG) emerged, a similar thing happened with Wizards of the Coast.

Seeing that Pokemon so popular, it was only a matter of time before GameFREAK got to work on making a sequel. The sequels to Red and Green, named Gold and Silver, were shown at the August 27, 1999 show “Nintendo Space World”, where it was the hit of the show. The Poke-mania was clearly still strong. ABC even held an interview with three people involved in the Pokemon process (this interview foreshadows the mobile connection Pokemon Crystal would have).

Pokemon Gold and Silver were released on November 21, 1999 in Japan, and October 14, 2000 in North America. A sequel to the games had clearly been thought about since the anime was made – the then-unidentified Pokemon Ho-Oh was seen in the first episode of the anime, Togepi was introduced as a ‘mysterious Pokemon’, and Marril, Snubbull, and Donphan were seen in the First Movie (released July 18, 1998 in North America) which of course raised speculation. When the games came out, I can assure you that they were very well-known. The Pokemon series was at its peak of popularity; there was not a single kid who couldn’t name all 151 Pokemon (ok, maybe there were some, but they were definitely not the popular kids). Even if you didn’t like Pokemon, you were familiar with it. Pokemon was at the height of its fad-dom.

Source: An interview with Satoshi Tajiri.