5 ms·

Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit

85 points by andsoitis 9mo ago

giancarlostoro 8mo ago
It was a labor of love originally.
- CobrastanJorji 8mo ago
  It was a beautiful attempt to reproduce a feeling of community that came from a bunch of kids collecting beetles in the woods for fun. Kids would need to get suggestions on where to go from other kids, and they'd show off the neat bugs they found and trade with other kids. The game was carefully designed to make kids work with each other and talk to each other. That's why you couldn't get all of the pokemon in only one game, and it's why some pokemon had ridiculous tricks to evolving them. It was wildly successful at that goal.
  - tiznow 8mo ago
    Roaming around the apartment complex I grew up, in with friends and a link cable meeting new kids and trading Pokemon were some of the best times of my life. I'm still a Pokemon fan to this day. I play Go all the time, collect cards when they're not obscene to acquire, and I'll probably buy a Switch 2 when they come out with the upgrade to immerse myself in the online aspect of modern Pokemon games. Fantastic franchise.
    - alargemoose 8mo ago
      Heads up that the switch 2 launched last May! (Depending on region) though they announced the next mainline Pokémon game won’t launch till 2027.
      - CobrastanJorji 8mo ago
        Above is probably referencing an "Upgrade Pack," a product allowing owners of Switch 1 games get them to work a little better on the Switch 2. For examples, the $10 "Pokemon Legends" Upgrade Pack slightly improves the frame rate and draw distance.
someperson 8mo ago
It's just a fad
- pennomi 8mo ago
  Just wait, in a thousand years archaeologists will be talking about our pantheon of monsters that were greatly revered by all.
- elictronic 8mo ago
  There's Godwins law about comparing everything to nazis. Will there be someperson's law of completely misunderstanding what a word means?
  - someperson 8mo ago
    It was sarcasm. Pokemon has been called a fad since it first gained popularity in 1998. Though to be fair the Pokemania era of the early 2000s was a blip, the same way Pokemon Go had a short-lived popularity surge in 2016. Pokemon is enduring.
  - FrustratedMonky 8mo ago
    Unfortunately, Goodwins law has lead to many people fearing to point out obvious fascism. Reversal of the Law: Mike Godwin himself has stated that his rule does not discredit efforts to make valid comparisons, particularly when democratic institutions are under threat.
  - lapetitejort 8mo ago
    You might be interested in Poe's Law [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
- iammjm 8mo ago
  When does a fad stop being a fad and start being a canon or an icon or whatever? Is Shakespeare a fad? As a 8 years old I knew all Pokémons by name their powers and I have spent literally all my pocket money on Pokémon, and now almost 30 years later people still seem to dig it. Also I don’t think it ever really went away in the meanwhile too. But yeah it could also just be millennial nostalgia and the cyclical nature of cultural products which over and over resurfaces and recycles and remixes the stuff from the past
crims0n 8mo ago
It is one of the few franchises that spans generations. My kids enjoy it, just as my wife and I enjoyed it before them. We have fun playing the games together. I imagine my parents felt the same way with Star Wars.
- joe_mamba 8mo ago
  I don't think your parents will enjoy the current crop of Star Wars IP.
  - boringg 8mo ago
    They might enjoy the skywalker ranch general store though!
  - crims0n 8mo ago
    Unsurprisingly, only one of my kids has shown any interest in Star Wars, and it is not in any of the new IP.
  - themadturk 8mo ago
    As an OG Star Wars fan (I was 21 when it came out), I had a really hard time when my kids liked the prequel trilogy more than the originals. As my youngest once told me (when he was in his teens), the original trilogy was great, but the prequels were the Star Wars his generation grew up with, and that made a difference. I'm fortunate that my kids grew up not only with their own favorites, but with appreciation for mine as well. The Star Wars comment opened my eyes to generational differences that have only grown since then, but at least with mutual respect for our differences. (And none of us really like the sequel trilogy that much).
- thinkingtoilet 8mo ago
  I didn't watch/play anything pokemon as a kid, I think I was just a little too old for it when it came out. My son got into it and we learned to play the card game, started going to a local game store, etc... I have fallen in love with it. Yes, the characters are cute/cuddly/goofy but if you get into the actual card game it is a deep strategy game with so many fun ways to play. My son still likes it but has moved on from it as his favorite, I now enjoy it and play it more than he does.
anshulbhide 8mo ago
Its the ultimate millennial throwback.
lifesaverluke 8mo ago
Last weekend I vibe-coded a website where my boys (5 and 8 years old) can look up their Pokémon cards to find out what they mean. They can read Dutch but they have cards with English & Portugese texts. Site helps them learning English :-) https://kartiq.xyz/en https://kartiq.xyz/en
- GenericDev 8mo ago
  [dead]
- ecliptik 8mo ago
  Very cool, we have some Korean Pokemon cards that this would work great on. Are you planning to support other languages?
- PretzelPirate 8mo ago
  From your /en route, clicking on a card brings me to the /nl/cards route.
  - lifesaverluke 8mo ago
    Will look into that. Thanks
bogzz 8mo ago
I just bought a controller attachment for my smartphone so I can replay Crystal and Emerald! I haven't tried any of the 3D games yet, do they still hold some of the charm that the 2D games had?
- dlivingston 8mo ago
  If you still have the original cartridges, highly recommend getting a ModRetro Chromatic or an Analogue Pocket to replay them. I have the ModRetro and it has been a lot of fun rediscovering my old childhood games.
  - bogzz 8mo ago
    I donated mine with my GameBoys to Red Cross when I turned 19 :( But I ordered the new Pocket Taco, which is like a controller that is taco-shaped and clamps around your smartphone, kinda turning it into a gameboy.
    - toast0 8mo ago
      > Pocket Taco, which is like a controller that is taco-shaped and clamps around your smartphone Nokia's N-Gage was a taco shaped smartphone before its time!
Liftyee 8mo ago
I never played any Pokémon game apart from Go, until I recently tried HG/SS on my phone. It was a joy to experience (mobile!) games in an era where they were made as a form of art instead of as a cheap money making scheme. No microtransactions, no mandatory grind to progress, but plenty of goals and side quests to try as you want.
- exhumet 8mo ago
  i mean overall the core pokemon experience has never changed, G/R/B, HGSS, Scarlet and Violet. Core gameplay is the exact thing you said, only paid differences are that now a days they do include some expansions (in the oldschool vein) that are often better than the current base games lol. But overall, outside of stuff like pokemongo, the CORE game franchise has largely been unaffected by a lot of the trends of modern gaming. And great choice, HGSS are a highpoint of the series. Might i also suggest Black and White and Black and White 2. the first time IMO they really tried to make the games more story heavy and they succeeded. The music and pixel art in BW is unmatched as well.
  - sdsd 8mo ago
    If you like the core games I highly recommend PokeMMO. It's the first five games glued together into an MMO and it's free.
JoshTriplett 8mo ago
As a kid, I had the original Pokemon Blue for the GBC. Played it, enjoyed it, found it novel, beat it. Went to an event, got an authentic Mew (certificate is still around somewhere). Not long after, I was gifted Pokemon Silver. Played a bit of it. Didn't find it novel anymore. Very rapidly had this feeling of "I see where this is going and I want off this ride". Gave up on Pokemon, and haven't regretted it even slightly. I know there have been many innovations in the mechanics since (e.g. double battles), and I realize the game has a very large amount of strategy. But it also felt like the same kind of feeling I get from games like MtG ("expensive cardboard"); that also has a lot of depth and strategy and new mechanics, but the "collection" aspect feels painful in an "I can see the Skinner box" way, in ways many other games don't. I had a similar feeling a few years later, when I played Wind Waker for the first time. That was one of the first games I intentionally decided not to 100%: specifically, I left out the picture gallery, which gave me the same "collectathon" feeling.
- bubblewand 8mo ago
  From what I can tell the staying power seems to be in: 1) New players. More of ‘em born every year! And, 2) Competitive play, which is a huge thing (I hate playing most games with randos online, personally, but lots of people love it). Like with any multiplayer game (call of duty, say) you need the latest entry or you’ll be looking at a ghost town in the multiplayer lobbies. Plus you get to experience the meta evolving, so it’s more dynamic than playing on an older one. They’ve got this whole graded ranking and matching system and a bunch of leaderboard stuff going on. I only know about the latter because I know a guy who usually spends at least a little time way up near the top of the rankings each time a new one of these comes out. Seems like a pretty large scene.
  - JoshTriplett 8mo ago
    I think it also attracts many different kinds of players (with overlap between them). Some of the same MtG "player personality archetypes" apply to Pokemon: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Player_type https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Player_type : hyper-competitive players, players who like swinging with the biggest baddest coolest Pokemon they can get, and combo players who like figuring out just the right combination of mechanics if you bring in some move from six games ago plus an item from three games ago plus a new Pokemon that just made the combo possible. Also throw in aspects like grinding for shinies or EVs. Different appreciations for asethetics apply as well: people who get really into the lore, people who really enjoy specific Pokemon (look at Yellow, or the Let's Go games), people who just want "whatever has the best stats". And each new game tends to take all of those archetypes into account when creating new content.
ecshafer 8mo ago
Its interesting that elementary kids have this kind of evergreen introduction to Pokemon. There is always a new set of games coming out, cards to buy, toys, anime. So kids see older kids with it, they want to get it, then they get introduced. So this "fad" has gone on for 30 years. However, even as someone who plays JRPGs. I can't for the life of me understand how adults are playing the games. The pokemon games are painful games to play, full of grinding, massive amounts of rng and just boring turn based combat (compared to other rpgs that exist). Why as an adult you would play Pokemon over SMT is something I can't get. Every time Ive tried ive bounced off newer games hard.
- teeray 8mo ago
  > Why as an adult you would play Pokemon over SMT is something I can't get. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
- jmarcher 8mo ago
  > Why as an adult you would play Pokemon Oh, I don't want to play Pokémon games, but every few hours, I am given the controller and told to beat the boss with a team composed of 6 low-level Pikachus and zero healing items.
- exhumet 8mo ago
  i play both! there is a sort of comfort in pokemon, like watching your favorite movie or eating junkfood, but i also love me a gourmet meal too. room for both! who doesnt wanna play a game with their favorite little doods, getting see what others can become favorites and then ya know everyone else playing so its a fun community thing. i also do love the grinding especially in the older games, and the RNG is fun to me. love when that 1% encounter rate hits after 30 mins of searching.
- sunaookami 8mo ago
  Newer Pokémon games have way more quality-of-life such as EXP share and way faster animations so it's not a slog anymore. Recently finished Scarlet and enjoyed it very much. Currently replaying SoulSilver and I couldn't play it without cheats that make the game a bit faster (cutting repetitive animations, making the game run at 60 FPS, etc.) since everything is so slow. I'm nearing 30 and have played a lot of JRPGs in my life.
FrustratedMonky 8mo ago
Now that Niantic was bought, how will Nintendo prevent any damage to the brand from the 'seemingly' money grab changes to Pokémon Go?
- haunter 8mo ago
  You mean Pokemon TCG which introduced illegal unregulated gambling for millions of kids (since 1996)? Don’t forget to buy the next pack for the special holo Raichu DX Spring Edition. Don’t pretend that Game Freak/Creatures/Nintendo are some saints.
  - anomaly_ 8mo ago
    What on earth are you talking about? 1) card collecting isn't gambling because there is no expectation of winning money, 2) Baseball and sports cards have been a thing for like 100 years at this point.
    - pigeons 8mo ago
      Nowadays a significant number of people who buy trading card packs/boxes do so as speculation of making money via obtaining a card they can sell for money. Baseball and sports cards weren't exchangeable for significant money 100 years ago.
      - anthk 8mo ago
        You must be young. Sport trading cards have been there forever and for instance in my country, Spain, OFC some of the rare -soccer related- sticky cards were sold by big amounts of money (not millions like TCG), but for sure you could buy a new cheap PC with some of them. And don't let me start with the old t-shirts. A weird one from my sports club today it's sold over $1000 even when back in the day no one liked the futurist design. Ditto with books celebrating the 100th anniversary of the club foundation day. These can produce a big chunk of money too. Even if I don't like Nintendo, these Japanese company didn't invent any gambling. It always was there.
perardi 8mo ago
I still do a double-take when I see Pokémon trading card game vending machines at the grocery store. I am an elder Millennial with no kids…I knew it was still a popular game, but seeing a great big Pokéball machine next to the shopping carts really drove it home.
poetril 8mo ago
I grew up playing the games, and still have my copy of Yellow and Red. I fell of the wagon somewhere around Gen VI, the games just got to easy. It became clear to me that Gamefreak was just throwing in the towel and gave up making interesting games. That being said, recently I started getting into the world of Romhacks and they have sparked new joy in me. The games are hard, fun, and have a lot of love poured into them. I'm going through Radical Red right now, and its been an incredible time.
- exhumet 8mo ago
  should check out the Legacy line of romhacks, ie Crystal Legacy, Emerald Legacy. if youre ever in the mood for vanilla+. very very high quality releases made with intention and care for the base games. For absolutely crazy releases, Pokemon Unbound is an absolutely next level romhack
- irishcoffee 8mo ago
  In my head there are and only ever will be ~151 pokemon. I played red/blue when they launched as 8-bit wonders. I could never get into the rest of them.
- asdff 8mo ago
  Pokemon is one of the worst games for min maxing into a broken game. You go on the subreddits and everyone runs the same perfectly optimal team with the same perfectly optimal movesets. Playing like that probably is remarkably boring, but also once you learn of these patterns and playstyles it becomes hard not to consider using them. Like games that give you free money cheats, the seems great for a second then the drive to actually play the game as it was meant to be played is lost. I've tried to keep my pokemon knowledge free and clear from this influence. I don't look up anything. I don't really understand the meta beyond basic type matchups. I fumble through the games inefficiently and slowly same as I did in the 90s.
- sylens 8mo ago
  The romhacks are definitely the way to go. I don't need much in terms of gameplay mechanics besides Gen 3 or Gen 4, what I do need is interesting and challenging dungeons/gauntlets
jtbayly 8mo ago
Rant incoming... My wife and I live near a park. When we go on walks, we see people who have driven to the park, where they drive slowly around the parking lot, frequently stopping and starting, cars running the whole time. Rarely do they get out of their car. They are, I believe, playing Pokemon Go. Yesterday there were over 2 dozen cars driving around. Nobody was walking. They don't talk to anybody. They are like zombies. I don't get it. Yesterday I did see one dad with his kid, and they were out actually walking on the trails. I can understand that. But driving to the park to drive around?! Argh! end rant. Thanks for listening.
- NewJazz 8mo ago
  Maybe complain to the council and ask them to remove the pokestop if people keep doing this.
- asdff 8mo ago
  You should have seen it when pokemon go came out
- MPSimmons 8mo ago
  I'm part of a pokemon go community, and the only time we ever do car raids is when the weather is terrible or freezing. What was the weather like?
- averynicepen 8mo ago
  It's usually not a question of laziness, but just path optimization. For big raid events, limited only to a few hours, Pokemon Go players will do whatever gets them to the most raids in that fixed amount of time. In places where the gyms are well placed in walkable parks, there are enough gyms that are close enough so that you can loop through the park, giving the system time to spawn new raids in the first gyms you already raided. Doing raids walking is actually preferable to driving, because in order to take down raid Pokemon, you also need a big enough raid party, and that's easier to judge with a crowd of people who agree to go in the same direction, instead of mystery players in mystery cars. But in SO many places in the US, the gyms just aren't close enough. It's both a fault of the urban environment and the game system, but it just frequently creates situations where if you want to catch a time-limited raid Pokemon that's shiny or has high stats, driving is often the only way to play in your area. What's funny though is that car or not, there are lots of Pokemon Go events where people don't talk to anybody. It's just a bunch of people who show up to the same spot, nod hey at each other, and then tap away on their phones in awkward proximity. Many people just have the personality type that drives them to solely play single player games, and there's no amount of game design that will push them to socialize. But it varies - that's what it was like on my university campus, but I've also been to park events where the age range and social friendliness is extremely varied and wonderful. It is a fascinating and unexpected community.
haunter 8mo ago
Love Pokemon, hate the whole unregulated illegal gambling part of it and how they pray on kids. It’s the dark side of Nintendo. And of course the stories like this https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2025-08-13/mcdonalds-pokemon-trading-cards-japan-18747408.html https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2025-08-13/mcd... Honestly TCGs like Pokemon, YuGiOh, and Magic should have been regulated long long time ago but we have 100 years of history with baseball cards too so nothing going to happen.
- basch 8mo ago
  Their extended popularity should be viewed closer to praying on addiction than an accomplishment of culture. The phone game, by removing the exploration of outside aspect, became just mindless collecting. If you have ever been to an event as an outside spectator, there is as much anxiety in their air as joy. Pack opening is the equivalent of pulltabs or scratch offs. It's an asset class closer to beanie babies than baseball cards, because there is no tie to a rookie going on to have a huge career or anything but artificial scarcity.
  - pixl97 8mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_card Addiction has always been a component here.
ohhnoodont 8mo ago
I loved gen 1 pokemon as a kid in the 90s. But today I sometimes feel like our culture is locked in time. Walking into a toy store is somewhat depressing - everything looks exactly the same as it did when I was a kid! It’s been 30+ years, kids should have way cooler toys and IPs.
- alexpotato 8mo ago
  > But today I sometimes feel like our culture is locked in time. People say this often and I agree that it does feel that way. They particularly underline "they are constantly remaking old movies!" which is also true. However, this is not a new phenomenon. As someone who loves movie trivia, IMDB is full of "this 1980s film was actually a remake of this other 1947 film". An older example: the Victorians (~1837 - ~1901) were obsessed with the ancient Romans. This was during a time when the telegraph was connecting the world and people could talk to humans, instantly, on the other side of the world.
  - bubblewand 8mo ago
    The Wizard of Oz (the one you know of) was a remake. The Thing (the one you know of—though the other had a longer title anyway) was a remake. The version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland (so, the one with that meme-able image of him pointing toward the camera) was a remake. (Franchises? There are some from like the 40s that had a dozen or so entries over the next couple decades) Many remake examples from almost all periods of filmmaking. There were tons of remakes of silent films after talkies came about, then another wave of remakes of jankier-effects stagier-acting-style movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s when effects got way better and naturalistic acting took over in the 70s (plus some of these were remaking black & white to color).
    - alexpotato 8mo ago
      Exactly! The opposite is also true: there are MANY authors who had entire series of books in the 1920s that were wildly popular yet largely unknown today. I imagine there are probably also films that everyone saw back then but are unheard of today.
mmooss 8mo ago
Here's a little story I read about how Pokemon's story intertwined with the rest of the fantasy gaming universe: You might have heard of another fantasy card game called Magic: The Gathering, started in the early 1990s by a small company called Wizards of the Coast which Wikipedia says was named after something in the founders' personal RPG world. MTG took off and WOTC did very well. In April 1997, apparently with cash to burn, WOTC invested in a bit of nostalgia, acquiring a dying gaming company called TSR which made a game called Dungeons & Dragons. D&D had peaked in the early 1980s and was then steadily run into the ground by two owners. WOTC's investment didn't do much for over a decade, iirc (becoming so desperate that Hasbro (see below) management embraced an employee's idea for 'open source gaming'). The same year WOTC continued their speculative investments, acquiring the US (or English language?) license to a Japanese fantasy card game called Pokemon. This one was a hit. Two years later Hasbro acquired WOTC. The story said that Hasbro wanted the Pokemon license and maybe MTG. The rest of the assets were an afterthought. The joke was on Hasbro because Nintendo canceled the Pokemon license in 2003, leaving Hasbro with MTG and that nostalgic afterthought, D&D. I wonder how Hasbro could acquire WOTC without some assurance about the Pokemon license. But D&D, in a business and cultural sense, of course became an amazing and I think very rare comeback story. (The story was from a few years ago; I don't know how D&D is doing right now.)
relwin 8mo ago
If you want to drop $8k or so you can buy a Pokemon pinball game from Stern: https://sternpinball.com/game/pokemon/ https://sternpinball.com/game/pokemon/ .
backscratches 8mo ago
The coolest hacker-esque Pokémon ROM I've seen is InfiniteFusion [1]. Let's you combine Pokémon into original "fusions", in other words, there are over 200,000 Pokémon. Impressively well done and very fun with lots of user accessible settings like difficulty and degree of randomness. For example, this is the sprite you see in game if you have Blastizard aka Blastoise/Charizard fusion: https://www.fusiondex.org/blastoise+charizard/ https://www.fusiondex.org/blastoise+charizard/ [1] https://infinitefusion.fandom.com/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Infinite_Fusion_Wiki https://infinitefusion.fandom.com/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Infinite...
shnpln 8mo ago
I am in my 30s, my wife and I enjoy collecting the cards still. We go to conventions and try to track down cool cards and trade for them. It is a fun side hobby that we do from time to time to get out of the house and meet new people. I have long since lost my love for the games, and I don't particularly care about the rarest cards. I just like tracking down cards that look cool to me and meeting people along the way.
orwin 8mo ago
I think the main story quality definitely decreased since black/white 2, but the ideas are there. And they streamlined the game enough that ev grinding isn't as painful, and breeding less random. To be really short: I think the solo games are slightly worse overall, but the multiplayer VCG is in the best state it ever was. They have tournaments with 5k people.
999900000999 8mo ago
I want a Pokémon game where you’re 40. As if you’re Red from the original game. Pokémon Mortgage edition
- 3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
  You reminded me of this VGCats comic https://vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=258 https://vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=258
ebbi 8mo ago
Maybe it's just my age, or bias driven by nostalgia, but I'm not a huge fan of recent Pokemon production - I feel the Pokemon creations themselves feel quite forced. But thinking back to Red/Blue days, and the OG Pokemon, that will always bring back good memories and nostalgia.
- zadikian 8mo ago
  Pretty sure gen 1 is inherently better IP and it's not a nostalgia thing. The only Pokemon I played was half of Crystal on a jailbroken iPhone as a kid.
password54321 8mo ago
Pokemon isn't entirely unique. A lot of things from the 90s are still popular because it is from a time before Israel plunged the world into madness. Culturally, things have dramatically stagnated ever since.

85 points by andsoitis 9mo ago

giancarlostoro 8mo ago

It was a labor of love originally.

CobrastanJorji 8mo ago
It was a beautiful attempt to reproduce a feeling of community that came from a bunch of kids collecting beetles in the woods for fun. Kids would need to get suggestions on where to go from other kids, and they'd show off the neat bugs they found and trade with other kids. The game was carefully designed to make kids work with each other and talk to each other. That's why you couldn't get all of the pokemon in only one game, and it's why some pokemon had ridiculous tricks to evolving them. It was wildly successful at that goal.
- tiznow 8mo ago
  Roaming around the apartment complex I grew up, in with friends and a link cable meeting new kids and trading Pokemon were some of the best times of my life. I'm still a Pokemon fan to this day. I play Go all the time, collect cards when they're not obscene to acquire, and I'll probably buy a Switch 2 when they come out with the upgrade to immerse myself in the online aspect of modern Pokemon games. Fantastic franchise.
  - alargemoose 8mo ago
    Heads up that the switch 2 launched last May! (Depending on region) though they announced the next mainline Pokémon game won’t launch till 2027.
    - CobrastanJorji 8mo ago
      Above is probably referencing an "Upgrade Pack," a product allowing owners of Switch 1 games get them to work a little better on the Switch 2. For examples, the $10 "Pokemon Legends" Upgrade Pack slightly improves the frame rate and draw distance.

someperson 8mo ago

It's just a fad

pennomi 8mo ago
Just wait, in a thousand years archaeologists will be talking about our pantheon of monsters that were greatly revered by all.
elictronic 8mo ago
There's Godwins law about comparing everything to nazis. Will there be someperson's law of completely misunderstanding what a word means?
- someperson 8mo ago
  It was sarcasm. Pokemon has been called a fad since it first gained popularity in 1998. Though to be fair the Pokemania era of the early 2000s was a blip, the same way Pokemon Go had a short-lived popularity surge in 2016. Pokemon is enduring.
- FrustratedMonky 8mo ago
  Unfortunately, Goodwins law has lead to many people fearing to point out obvious fascism. Reversal of the Law: Mike Godwin himself has stated that his rule does not discredit efforts to make valid comparisons, particularly when democratic institutions are under threat.
- lapetitejort 8mo ago
  You might be interested in Poe's Law [0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
iammjm 8mo ago
When does a fad stop being a fad and start being a canon or an icon or whatever? Is Shakespeare a fad? As a 8 years old I knew all Pokémons by name their powers and I have spent literally all my pocket money on Pokémon, and now almost 30 years later people still seem to dig it. Also I don’t think it ever really went away in the meanwhile too. But yeah it could also just be millennial nostalgia and the cyclical nature of cultural products which over and over resurfaces and recycles and remixes the stuff from the past

crims0n 8mo ago

It is one of the few franchises that spans generations. My kids enjoy it, just as my wife and I enjoyed it before them. We have fun playing the games together. I imagine my parents felt the same way with Star Wars.

joe_mamba 8mo ago
I don't think your parents will enjoy the current crop of Star Wars IP.
- boringg 8mo ago
  They might enjoy the skywalker ranch general store though!
- crims0n 8mo ago
  Unsurprisingly, only one of my kids has shown any interest in Star Wars, and it is not in any of the new IP.
- themadturk 8mo ago
  As an OG Star Wars fan (I was 21 when it came out), I had a really hard time when my kids liked the prequel trilogy more than the originals. As my youngest once told me (when he was in his teens), the original trilogy was great, but the prequels were the Star Wars his generation grew up with, and that made a difference. I'm fortunate that my kids grew up not only with their own favorites, but with appreciation for mine as well. The Star Wars comment opened my eyes to generational differences that have only grown since then, but at least with mutual respect for our differences. (And none of us really like the sequel trilogy that much).
thinkingtoilet 8mo ago
I didn't watch/play anything pokemon as a kid, I think I was just a little too old for it when it came out. My son got into it and we learned to play the card game, started going to a local game store, etc... I have fallen in love with it. Yes, the characters are cute/cuddly/goofy but if you get into the actual card game it is a deep strategy game with so many fun ways to play. My son still likes it but has moved on from it as his favorite, I now enjoy it and play it more than he does.

anshulbhide 8mo ago

Its the ultimate millennial throwback.

lifesaverluke 8mo ago

Last weekend I vibe-coded a website where my boys (5 and 8 years old) can look up their Pokémon cards to find out what they mean. They can read Dutch but they have cards with English & Portugese texts. Site helps them learning English :-) https://kartiq.xyz/en https://kartiq.xyz/en

GenericDev 8mo ago
[dead]
ecliptik 8mo ago
Very cool, we have some Korean Pokemon cards that this would work great on. Are you planning to support other languages?
PretzelPirate 8mo ago
From your /en route, clicking on a card brings me to the /nl/cards route.
- lifesaverluke 8mo ago
  Will look into that. Thanks

bogzz 8mo ago

I just bought a controller attachment for my smartphone so I can replay Crystal and Emerald! I haven't tried any of the 3D games yet, do they still hold some of the charm that the 2D games had?

dlivingston 8mo ago
If you still have the original cartridges, highly recommend getting a ModRetro Chromatic or an Analogue Pocket to replay them. I have the ModRetro and it has been a lot of fun rediscovering my old childhood games.
- bogzz 8mo ago
  I donated mine with my GameBoys to Red Cross when I turned 19 :( But I ordered the new Pocket Taco, which is like a controller that is taco-shaped and clamps around your smartphone, kinda turning it into a gameboy.
  - toast0 8mo ago
    > Pocket Taco, which is like a controller that is taco-shaped and clamps around your smartphone Nokia's N-Gage was a taco shaped smartphone before its time!

Liftyee 8mo ago

I never played any Pokémon game apart from Go, until I recently tried HG/SS on my phone. It was a joy to experience (mobile!) games in an era where they were made as a form of art instead of as a cheap money making scheme. No microtransactions, no mandatory grind to progress, but plenty of goals and side quests to try as you want.

exhumet 8mo ago
i mean overall the core pokemon experience has never changed, G/R/B, HGSS, Scarlet and Violet. Core gameplay is the exact thing you said, only paid differences are that now a days they do include some expansions (in the oldschool vein) that are often better than the current base games lol. But overall, outside of stuff like pokemongo, the CORE game franchise has largely been unaffected by a lot of the trends of modern gaming. And great choice, HGSS are a highpoint of the series. Might i also suggest Black and White and Black and White 2. the first time IMO they really tried to make the games more story heavy and they succeeded. The music and pixel art in BW is unmatched as well.
- sdsd 8mo ago
  If you like the core games I highly recommend PokeMMO. It's the first five games glued together into an MMO and it's free.

JoshTriplett 8mo ago

As a kid, I had the original Pokemon Blue for the GBC. Played it, enjoyed it, found it novel, beat it. Went to an event, got an authentic Mew (certificate is still around somewhere). Not long after, I was gifted Pokemon Silver. Played a bit of it. Didn't find it novel anymore. Very rapidly had this feeling of "I see where this is going and I want off this ride". Gave up on Pokemon, and haven't regretted it even slightly. I know there have been many innovations in the mechanics since (e.g. double battles), and I realize the game has a very large amount of strategy. But it also felt like the same kind of feeling I get from games like MtG ("expensive cardboard"); that also has a lot of depth and strategy and new mechanics, but the "collection" aspect feels painful in an "I can see the Skinner box" way, in ways many other games don't. I had a similar feeling a few years later, when I played Wind Waker for the first time. That was one of the first games I intentionally decided not to 100%: specifically, I left out the picture gallery, which gave me the same "collectathon" feeling.

bubblewand 8mo ago
From what I can tell the staying power seems to be in: 1) New players. More of ‘em born every year! And, 2) Competitive play, which is a huge thing (I hate playing most games with randos online, personally, but lots of people love it). Like with any multiplayer game (call of duty, say) you need the latest entry or you’ll be looking at a ghost town in the multiplayer lobbies. Plus you get to experience the meta evolving, so it’s more dynamic than playing on an older one. They’ve got this whole graded ranking and matching system and a bunch of leaderboard stuff going on. I only know about the latter because I know a guy who usually spends at least a little time way up near the top of the rankings each time a new one of these comes out. Seems like a pretty large scene.
- JoshTriplett 8mo ago
  I think it also attracts many different kinds of players (with overlap between them). Some of the same MtG "player personality archetypes" apply to Pokemon: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Player_type https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Player_type : hyper-competitive players, players who like swinging with the biggest baddest coolest Pokemon they can get, and combo players who like figuring out just the right combination of mechanics if you bring in some move from six games ago plus an item from three games ago plus a new Pokemon that just made the combo possible. Also throw in aspects like grinding for shinies or EVs. Different appreciations for asethetics apply as well: people who get really into the lore, people who really enjoy specific Pokemon (look at Yellow, or the Let's Go games), people who just want "whatever has the best stats". And each new game tends to take all of those archetypes into account when creating new content.

ecshafer 8mo ago

Its interesting that elementary kids have this kind of evergreen introduction to Pokemon. There is always a new set of games coming out, cards to buy, toys, anime. So kids see older kids with it, they want to get it, then they get introduced. So this "fad" has gone on for 30 years. However, even as someone who plays JRPGs. I can't for the life of me understand how adults are playing the games. The pokemon games are painful games to play, full of grinding, massive amounts of rng and just boring turn based combat (compared to other rpgs that exist). Why as an adult you would play Pokemon over SMT is something I can't get. Every time Ive tried ive bounced off newer games hard.

teeray 8mo ago
> Why as an adult you would play Pokemon over SMT is something I can't get. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
jmarcher 8mo ago
> Why as an adult you would play Pokemon Oh, I don't want to play Pokémon games, but every few hours, I am given the controller and told to beat the boss with a team composed of 6 low-level Pikachus and zero healing items.
exhumet 8mo ago
i play both! there is a sort of comfort in pokemon, like watching your favorite movie or eating junkfood, but i also love me a gourmet meal too. room for both! who doesnt wanna play a game with their favorite little doods, getting see what others can become favorites and then ya know everyone else playing so its a fun community thing. i also do love the grinding especially in the older games, and the RNG is fun to me. love when that 1% encounter rate hits after 30 mins of searching.
sunaookami 8mo ago
Newer Pokémon games have way more quality-of-life such as EXP share and way faster animations so it's not a slog anymore. Recently finished Scarlet and enjoyed it very much. Currently replaying SoulSilver and I couldn't play it without cheats that make the game a bit faster (cutting repetitive animations, making the game run at 60 FPS, etc.) since everything is so slow. I'm nearing 30 and have played a lot of JRPGs in my life.

FrustratedMonky 8mo ago

Now that Niantic was bought, how will Nintendo prevent any damage to the brand from the 'seemingly' money grab changes to Pokémon Go?

haunter 8mo ago
You mean Pokemon TCG which introduced illegal unregulated gambling for millions of kids (since 1996)? Don’t forget to buy the next pack for the special holo Raichu DX Spring Edition. Don’t pretend that Game Freak/Creatures/Nintendo are some saints.
- anomaly_ 8mo ago
  What on earth are you talking about? 1) card collecting isn't gambling because there is no expectation of winning money, 2) Baseball and sports cards have been a thing for like 100 years at this point.
  - pigeons 8mo ago
    Nowadays a significant number of people who buy trading card packs/boxes do so as speculation of making money via obtaining a card they can sell for money. Baseball and sports cards weren't exchangeable for significant money 100 years ago.
    - anthk 8mo ago
      You must be young. Sport trading cards have been there forever and for instance in my country, Spain, OFC some of the rare -soccer related- sticky cards were sold by big amounts of money (not millions like TCG), but for sure you could buy a new cheap PC with some of them. And don't let me start with the old t-shirts. A weird one from my sports club today it's sold over $1000 even when back in the day no one liked the futurist design. Ditto with books celebrating the 100th anniversary of the club foundation day. These can produce a big chunk of money too. Even if I don't like Nintendo, these Japanese company didn't invent any gambling. It always was there.

perardi 8mo ago

I still do a double-take when I see Pokémon trading card game vending machines at the grocery store. I am an elder Millennial with no kids…I knew it was still a popular game, but seeing a great big Pokéball machine next to the shopping carts really drove it home.

poetril 8mo ago

I grew up playing the games, and still have my copy of Yellow and Red. I fell of the wagon somewhere around Gen VI, the games just got to easy. It became clear to me that Gamefreak was just throwing in the towel and gave up making interesting games. That being said, recently I started getting into the world of Romhacks and they have sparked new joy in me. The games are hard, fun, and have a lot of love poured into them. I'm going through Radical Red right now, and its been an incredible time.

exhumet 8mo ago
should check out the Legacy line of romhacks, ie Crystal Legacy, Emerald Legacy. if youre ever in the mood for vanilla+. very very high quality releases made with intention and care for the base games. For absolutely crazy releases, Pokemon Unbound is an absolutely next level romhack
irishcoffee 8mo ago
In my head there are and only ever will be ~151 pokemon. I played red/blue when they launched as 8-bit wonders. I could never get into the rest of them.
asdff 8mo ago
Pokemon is one of the worst games for min maxing into a broken game. You go on the subreddits and everyone runs the same perfectly optimal team with the same perfectly optimal movesets. Playing like that probably is remarkably boring, but also once you learn of these patterns and playstyles it becomes hard not to consider using them. Like games that give you free money cheats, the seems great for a second then the drive to actually play the game as it was meant to be played is lost. I've tried to keep my pokemon knowledge free and clear from this influence. I don't look up anything. I don't really understand the meta beyond basic type matchups. I fumble through the games inefficiently and slowly same as I did in the 90s.
sylens 8mo ago
The romhacks are definitely the way to go. I don't need much in terms of gameplay mechanics besides Gen 3 or Gen 4, what I do need is interesting and challenging dungeons/gauntlets

jtbayly 8mo ago

Rant incoming... My wife and I live near a park. When we go on walks, we see people who have driven to the park, where they drive slowly around the parking lot, frequently stopping and starting, cars running the whole time. Rarely do they get out of their car. They are, I believe, playing Pokemon Go. Yesterday there were over 2 dozen cars driving around. Nobody was walking. They don't talk to anybody. They are like zombies. I don't get it. Yesterday I did see one dad with his kid, and they were out actually walking on the trails. I can understand that. But driving to the park to drive around?! Argh! end rant. Thanks for listening.

NewJazz 8mo ago
Maybe complain to the council and ask them to remove the pokestop if people keep doing this.
asdff 8mo ago
You should have seen it when pokemon go came out
MPSimmons 8mo ago
I'm part of a pokemon go community, and the only time we ever do car raids is when the weather is terrible or freezing. What was the weather like?
averynicepen 8mo ago
It's usually not a question of laziness, but just path optimization. For big raid events, limited only to a few hours, Pokemon Go players will do whatever gets them to the most raids in that fixed amount of time. In places where the gyms are well placed in walkable parks, there are enough gyms that are close enough so that you can loop through the park, giving the system time to spawn new raids in the first gyms you already raided. Doing raids walking is actually preferable to driving, because in order to take down raid Pokemon, you also need a big enough raid party, and that's easier to judge with a crowd of people who agree to go in the same direction, instead of mystery players in mystery cars. But in SO many places in the US, the gyms just aren't close enough. It's both a fault of the urban environment and the game system, but it just frequently creates situations where if you want to catch a time-limited raid Pokemon that's shiny or has high stats, driving is often the only way to play in your area. What's funny though is that car or not, there are lots of Pokemon Go events where people don't talk to anybody. It's just a bunch of people who show up to the same spot, nod hey at each other, and then tap away on their phones in awkward proximity. Many people just have the personality type that drives them to solely play single player games, and there's no amount of game design that will push them to socialize. But it varies - that's what it was like on my university campus, but I've also been to park events where the age range and social friendliness is extremely varied and wonderful. It is a fascinating and unexpected community.

haunter 8mo ago

Love Pokemon, hate the whole unregulated illegal gambling part of it and how they pray on kids. It’s the dark side of Nintendo. And of course the stories like this https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2025-08-13/mcdonalds-pokemon-trading-cards-japan-18747408.html https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2025-08-13/mcd... Honestly TCGs like Pokemon, YuGiOh, and Magic should have been regulated long long time ago but we have 100 years of history with baseball cards too so nothing going to happen.

basch 8mo ago
Their extended popularity should be viewed closer to praying on addiction than an accomplishment of culture. The phone game, by removing the exploration of outside aspect, became just mindless collecting. If you have ever been to an event as an outside spectator, there is as much anxiety in their air as joy. Pack opening is the equivalent of pulltabs or scratch offs. It's an asset class closer to beanie babies than baseball cards, because there is no tie to a rookie going on to have a huge career or anything but artificial scarcity.
- pixl97 8mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_card Addiction has always been a component here.

ohhnoodont 8mo ago

I loved gen 1 pokemon as a kid in the 90s. But today I sometimes feel like our culture is locked in time. Walking into a toy store is somewhat depressing - everything looks exactly the same as it did when I was a kid! It’s been 30+ years, kids should have way cooler toys and IPs.

alexpotato 8mo ago
> But today I sometimes feel like our culture is locked in time. People say this often and I agree that it does feel that way. They particularly underline "they are constantly remaking old movies!" which is also true. However, this is not a new phenomenon. As someone who loves movie trivia, IMDB is full of "this 1980s film was actually a remake of this other 1947 film". An older example: the Victorians (~1837 - ~1901) were obsessed with the ancient Romans. This was during a time when the telegraph was connecting the world and people could talk to humans, instantly, on the other side of the world.
- bubblewand 8mo ago
  The Wizard of Oz (the one you know of) was a remake. The Thing (the one you know of—though the other had a longer title anyway) was a remake. The version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Donald Sutherland (so, the one with that meme-able image of him pointing toward the camera) was a remake. (Franchises? There are some from like the 40s that had a dozen or so entries over the next couple decades) Many remake examples from almost all periods of filmmaking. There were tons of remakes of silent films after talkies came about, then another wave of remakes of jankier-effects stagier-acting-style movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s when effects got way better and naturalistic acting took over in the 70s (plus some of these were remaking black & white to color).
  - alexpotato 8mo ago
    Exactly! The opposite is also true: there are MANY authors who had entire series of books in the 1920s that were wildly popular yet largely unknown today. I imagine there are probably also films that everyone saw back then but are unheard of today.

mmooss 8mo ago

Here's a little story I read about how Pokemon's story intertwined with the rest of the fantasy gaming universe: You might have heard of another fantasy card game called Magic: The Gathering, started in the early 1990s by a small company called Wizards of the Coast which Wikipedia says was named after something in the founders' personal RPG world. MTG took off and WOTC did very well. In April 1997, apparently with cash to burn, WOTC invested in a bit of nostalgia, acquiring a dying gaming company called TSR which made a game called Dungeons & Dragons. D&D had peaked in the early 1980s and was then steadily run into the ground by two owners. WOTC's investment didn't do much for over a decade, iirc (becoming so desperate that Hasbro (see below) management embraced an employee's idea for 'open source gaming'). The same year WOTC continued their speculative investments, acquiring the US (or English language?) license to a Japanese fantasy card game called Pokemon. This one was a hit. Two years later Hasbro acquired WOTC. The story said that Hasbro wanted the Pokemon license and maybe MTG. The rest of the assets were an afterthought. The joke was on Hasbro because Nintendo canceled the Pokemon license in 2003, leaving Hasbro with MTG and that nostalgic afterthought, D&D. I wonder how Hasbro could acquire WOTC without some assurance about the Pokemon license. But D&D, in a business and cultural sense, of course became an amazing and I think very rare comeback story. (The story was from a few years ago; I don't know how D&D is doing right now.)

relwin 8mo ago

If you want to drop $8k or so you can buy a Pokemon pinball game from Stern: https://sternpinball.com/game/pokemon/ https://sternpinball.com/game/pokemon/ .

backscratches 8mo ago

The coolest hacker-esque Pokémon ROM I've seen is InfiniteFusion [1]. Let's you combine Pokémon into original "fusions", in other words, there are over 200,000 Pokémon. Impressively well done and very fun with lots of user accessible settings like difficulty and degree of randomness. For example, this is the sprite you see in game if you have Blastizard aka Blastoise/Charizard fusion: https://www.fusiondex.org/blastoise+charizard/ https://www.fusiondex.org/blastoise+charizard/ [1] https://infinitefusion.fandom.com/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Infinite_Fusion_Wiki https://infinitefusion.fandom.com/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Infinite...

shnpln 8mo ago

I am in my 30s, my wife and I enjoy collecting the cards still. We go to conventions and try to track down cool cards and trade for them. It is a fun side hobby that we do from time to time to get out of the house and meet new people. I have long since lost my love for the games, and I don't particularly care about the rarest cards. I just like tracking down cards that look cool to me and meeting people along the way.

orwin 8mo ago

I think the main story quality definitely decreased since black/white 2, but the ideas are there. And they streamlined the game enough that ev grinding isn't as painful, and breeding less random. To be really short: I think the solo games are slightly worse overall, but the multiplayer VCG is in the best state it ever was. They have tournaments with 5k people.

999900000999 8mo ago

I want a Pokémon game where you’re 40. As if you’re Red from the original game. Pokémon Mortgage edition

3eb7988a1663 8mo ago
You reminded me of this VGCats comic https://vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=258 https://vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=258

ebbi 8mo ago

Maybe it's just my age, or bias driven by nostalgia, but I'm not a huge fan of recent Pokemon production - I feel the Pokemon creations themselves feel quite forced. But thinking back to Red/Blue days, and the OG Pokemon, that will always bring back good memories and nostalgia.

zadikian 8mo ago
Pretty sure gen 1 is inherently better IP and it's not a nostalgia thing. The only Pokemon I played was half of Crystal on a jailbroken iPhone as a kid.

password54321 8mo ago

Pokemon isn't entirely unique. A lot of things from the 90s are still popular because it is from a time before Israel plunged the world into madness. Culturally, things have dramatically stagnated ever since.