Thirty years ago, a young Japanese game designer named Satoshi Tajiri walked into Nintendo with an idea that nobody expected to change the world. Tajiri had grown up completely obsessed with collecting insects, earning himself the childhood nickname Dr. Bug, and as the forests near his home in Tokyo were slowly paved over one by one, he dreamed of creating a game that could capture that same sense of wonder and discovery for a brand new generation of kids. The idea first came to him in 1990 when he spotted the cable connecting two Game Boy handheld consoles and imagined tiny bugs crawling between them, ferrying their creatures from one small glowing screen to the other. Six years of careful development later, the first two Pokemon games launched quietly in Japan on hardware that Nintendo itself considered aging and approaching the end of its natural life span.
What followed is one of the most unexpected success stories in all of entertainment history. Word spread fast among children on school playgrounds, trading cards appeared, an animated series launched, and the games eventually arrived in the United States to a reception that grew from simple curiosity into a full-blown cultural obsession almost overnight. The franchise went on to not just extend the Game Boy’s life span but nearly double it, and by the time Pokemon Go sent millions of people wandering city streets in search of virtual creatures in 2016, it had already become the highest-grossing media franchise in the world. Today the Smithsonian National Museum of American History holds Pokemon artifacts in its permanent collection, rare cards sell for record-setting sums at auction, and the games continue welcoming brand new generations of players while remaining just as beloved by the adults who grew up catching them all as kids.
