How Pokemon became a source of soft power and among the world's biggest media franchises
CBC
As a child, Satoshi Tajiri loved to collect and play with bugs in his backyard. As he grew up, he loved going to the arcade to play video games. So he decided to merge the two.
The result? One of the biggest franchises in the world.
“Pokemon is almost a lifestyle at this point,” Matt Alt, a Tokyo-based writer and author of Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World, told The Sunday Magazine.
This month, Tajiri’s creation, Pokemon, celebrates its 30th anniversary, which it kicked off with a Super Bowl ad featuring celebrities such as Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Lady Gaga, Trevor Noah, Jisoo, and Lamine Yamal discussing their favourite Pokemon.
And since those creatures arrived on the scene in 1996, Pokemon has become the highest-grossing media franchise, far surpassing popular IPs such as Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Harry Potter.
So far it has grossed over $100 billion US, with License Global reporting $12 billion US in profit in 2024.
It’s held up by its video games, trading cards and anime series, which has turned it into an economic powerhouse and even a source of soft power that has helped propel Japan’s global influence.
Tajiri began working on a game for the Nintendo Game Boy in 1990 — the latest handheld gaming system at the time — that would include 150 creatures for people to catch, collect and battle. Development took six years, but on Feb. 27, 1996, Pokemon Red and Green were officially released in Japan.
Alt says when Nintendo realized it had a hit, it threw its weight behind it. It made comic books for the franchise, a cartoon series and trading cards — a common marketing practice in Japan, Alt says.
By the time Pokemon landed in North America in 1999, it already had what Alt calls a fully formed media ecosystem.
“It hit like a meteor,” Alt said. “It absolutely profoundly transformed the childhood fantasy space in the West.”
Hanine El Mir was seven when her brother got a Game Boy Color, the predecessor to Nintendo’s original Game Boy. The siblings started playing Pokemon Blue, and both were hooked.
Since then, El Mir has played every Pokemon game that’s been released, and now she studies video games at Concordia University in Montreal. Even the music from the games has an effect on her, she said.
“It transports me to a different time, a time with less responsibility,” she said. “I'm on my parent’s couch not having to worry about anything, just playing for hours and hours during summer,” said El Mir, who has researched the power nostalgia has over Pokemon fans.
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