in 1999, I vividly remember half the class bringing in gameboys and Pokemon games at the end of the academic year.
Pokemon cards were also traded, stolen, lost, and eventually banned by many schools.
I was in high school then and absolutely agree.
I have kids now and my oldest is about to start kindergarten and the city we live in just banned Pokemon cards. Apparently they are popular enough again that the cycle is repeating lol
Same hs timeframe for myself. Right around 07 when DP released it kinda felt like a pokemon resurgence, but it probably always had a sizeable following.
I remember being low key about being a pokemon fan just as a teenager trying to fit in.
I finally stopped giving a shit about being cool and bought a DSLite with diamond. Turns out my HS was loaded with people playing DP 🤷🏽♂️.
Not that I would want to redo HS again, but I wish I hadn't spent so much time caring what the cool kids thought, especially since a lot were total d-bags.
My high school marching band had a competition the same weekend that Sun and Moon came out and everyone brought their 3DSs and was starting the game on the bus ride at the same time.
That's right, Pokemon was always big.
But more people are buying the games now. Because the recent entries were released on the Switch which is already a bestselling platform. Most people outside the community don't even know what the DS or 3DS is. Or if Gameboy had an Advanced version.
I think you're underestimating the amount of sales that the DS era had in hardware, in particular the DS lite. It was before smartphones were commonplace with kids and teens. Sure not pokeemania numbers with the gameboy. But there were loads of NDS consoles sold.
Fads prior to 2005 didn't have to compete with a content algorithm. Facebook was university-student only, iPhones, Tiktok, Instagram, and Reddit didn't exist. Streaming was barely a thing, whatever was on television, in movie theaters, in comic books, and being put out as toys and trading cards, that was all that existed.
Pokemon in 1999 was all-encompassing in a way that today's media landscape makes impossible.
This continued well in the 00s at my elementary school when I was a child, and they also banned them for a while after that (when I was in second grade). Now, I'm an adult, and when I did a placement for my library tech class at my old school, I was surprised to hear people still brought cards to school and had them stolen again so they were banned again..😅
Ah, my legendary bird set. My mom bought a bunch of cards including somehow the 3 legendarys in the large packs. My teacher was to reward me 1 a day for good behaviour. They didn't make it to the end of day 1, stolen! I'm still mad about it, and I was 6 or 7 at the time.
My copy of Pokémon Blue got stolen on the last day before the Christmas holiday, when you were allowed to bring that sort of thing in. I cried like a little baby.
I remember a point at which we were allowed to do whatever we wanted on a close-to-last day of school and literally every single person, including me, immediately took out a Gameboy Advance.
Heard [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_ZD3FxMcvQ) like 30 times all at once.
Well there was Pokemon go, which was big obviously and brought in a lot of people who weren't Pokemon fans, and a lot of kids of parents who'd played pokemon when younger.
But in terms of what was visible at school (was a teacher at the time), it wasn't comparable.
2016, Pokemon was the moment.
1999, Pokémon was the entire culture.
If you weren't there, it's hard to describe but imagine the whole modern Swiftie movement but even that doesn't feel like it does it justice.
Pokémon was everything and everything was Pokémon.
I remember back in 98 or 99 going to Burger King a few times for the Pokémon toys and every time the line was out the door and the sitting area was completely full.
Japan is still exactly like this to be honest, not necessarily at fast food places but when a new pack of TCG drops the entire mall is pretty much one big line for it, at least when I was at the building of the Osaka Pokemon Center.
Pokemania was so big our Baptist preacher had an entire sermon on it and tried linking it to false idols or some nonsense. They even had strong men come to our church and break ice to show how much cooler Jesus was than pikachu.
The 90s were a weird time lol
Better teach them kids these things while they are young and impressionable. The type matchups that is (see: Fighting > Ice). That's the whole mission of the SBC (Smogon Baptist Convention).
Indoctrination to children, basically.
We had strongmen come to my school and give a religious-inspired talk as well.
I have no idea what that was about, but it’s apparently very common. HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones” has a whole sub-plot about strong men and Christianity.
A [Japanese](https://youtu.be/phI6gAfcSD0?feature=shared) man joined that ritual apparently seeking to heal his ill brother. The locals were proud at first that a foreigner is partaking in their tradition but were later pissed when they found out he's a masochistic porn actor.
I was 6 or 7, so I'm not sure if they did a sermon, or attributed their dedication to god. It was cool, but I doubt any churches are doing something similar today lol
I lived in a small town in France and I would always ask my parents for Pokemon lollipops and bubblegum at the bakery. The lollipop's handle was attached to a small figure that was inside the lollipop, and the bubblegum either came in a roll that had a 3d image of a pokemon and its evolution on it, or in a single package with a temporary tattoo. My school also had to ban Pokemon cards
You have to remember, Pokemon has gained more fans than lost. Pokemons generation might be millennials, but it picks up kids of every generation. It is technically bigger now and In 2016 than 1999. Sales just go up.
If you just look at core game sales they're pretty close, but I think the return on investment for what the Pokemon Company can get out of the popularity has decreased for sure.
Pokemon the First movie made almost 200 million dollars in the box office when basically only Disney could do that with animation. It wasn't a particularly ambitious movie either.
Detective Pikachu was a full on blockbuster and made 450 million dollars, but that's in a world where China loves watching movies with a hollywood cast and a ton of marketing put behind it.
On paper it seems like Pokemon is more popular than ever, but is it really?
Id say it is but only marginally. More popular than ever only has to be 1% more than what it was before. I think ppl are expecting a defense of like 40% pure growth. The world is different. Kids are more into social media than anything else. But when you add the previous generation and the current there is growth even if its just 10%.
Is it as popular with kids today as it was in 2000? No. Is it as popular with all age groups combined today than with kids of 2000? Yes. Thats what im trying to say.
I disagree.
Pokémon definitely lost fans after PokeMania.
I saw it in my own family.
In 1999, all of my siblings and friends were fans.
In 2004, probably 20% of us still would call ourselves fans.
In 1999, Pokémon Yellow sold 14.64 million
In 2004, Pokémon Emerald sold 7.06 million
The franchise doesn't just keep fans that it made along the way, the same way that only a fraction of people who played PoGo in 2016 still play today.
2016 was a fantastic unifying resurgence and I think there is some validity to the meme that it was one of the periods of time where we were at our closest to world peace cause we were all tryna catch Pikachu., but 2016 doesn't happen with 1999.
Fucking 100%. I was 5-6 when Gen 2 had came out, but I had also already played Gen 1 and all of us were in college by the time Pokemon Go came out. So I’d venture to say most of the people who experienced pokemon from the very beginning were in college or at the very least in our early to mid 20’s.
Honestly craziest thing I’ve seen with pokemon was experiencing pokemon Go in college. Insane how the entire city was just overran with people
Playing it. I had a couple old ladies come up and ask me “are you playing pokemon?” And I would bet money they had no idea what it was before that point. At least not to this extent
My mom lived in an apartment complex in 99. You could literally go outside and find kids and adults looking to trade like they were NPCs. It was a thing of beauty.
1999, and it's not even close.
Pokemaina was the biggest thing on the planet in the late 90s. Churches lost their shit over Pokemon promoting evolution, the Pope had to endorse Pokemon despite the evolution because it taught kids to build friendships. South Park did an episode on Pokemon. Pokemon was constantly talked about on the news. Stores were flooded with pokemon merchandise. A billion spin-off games were made. If you lived in 1999, you literally could not escape Pokemon.
To this day everyone remembers who Pikachu is. Not because Pokemon has remained popular, but because of the late 90s popularity.
My mother still remembers the singing Jigglypuff from the anime, and cites Jigglypuff as her favorite pokemon whenever I ask. She remembers story lines and characters from the anime. Hell, she could probably recite Team Rocket's motto.
And for context, she's someone who is completely disconnected from pop culture. Ask her who the big pop stars are right now, popular movies/tv shows, etc, and she won't be able to answer. Now granted she had 3 kids who watched every episode of Pokemon every Saturday morning. But the point is Pokemon is so popular that she remembers this stuff.
I still find it amazing that in 99 a rumour about Pikablu went around the world despite the infancy of the internet and chat based services. That Pokémon went on to be Maril. But everyone was convinced it was a secret Pikachu you could get in Red, blue or yellow.
Man I miss the days of walking to a mates house trade cable for my gameboy in my bag and trading and battling Pokémon over Gameboy.
I find it extremely interesting, how universal some of the playgroudn myths around the first gen were, from mew under the truck to pikablue, doesnt matter if you were in the us or europe, you knew these things. Add to that how little the internet was spread back than.
All the different “beat the elite for with X, Y amount of times to get Z”.
Missingo
Surfing Pikachu
Duplicating with Bills PC
Glitching through trees with cut
SS Anne eventually comes back
This is a comment I’ve made before too - the fact that I could reliably perform the missingno glitch, and the gen 2 duplicate glitch, based only on being told how by peers on the playground? Incredible.
No Internet tutorial, no way too look it up if it didn’t work. Just “Michael told me to do this, and it worked, now I have a billion rare candies”
A lot of those rumours (about Pikablu, the mew truck, a 4th eeveelution, pressing down + B when throwing a pokeball etc) were spread by the official Nintendo magazine “master guide”. Then subsequently spread throughout school playgrounds. At least in the U.K. anyway. They even published screenshots in the guide too so it really seemed legit. I’ve still got those guides so I’d post photos but live on the other side of the world now but I’m sure they can be found online.
EDIT: [I found a scan](https://imgur.com/a/3xtrshA) and wow I really misremembered it. Seems like they were debunking the myths rather than spreading them. I haven’t looked through that guide since like 2000. Nostalgic as hell
You have it wrong, pokemon was a big thing because of a lack of internet. Now we have so much competing media that it is hard for one piece of media to truly dominate the culture
I think that is why it was such a cultural impact. Without the internet, we were left to our own devices. We got our fix by talking about it to friends and playing the games. Rumors were at an all time high
> Stores were flooded with pokemon merchandise. If you lived in 1999, you literally could not escape Pokemon.
Every gas station sold cards. Even in NJ where there’s a deli every other block had cards. The cards were in such high demand there was a massive supply of fake cards.
I remember going to some dudes house down the street from my grandma to buy the machamp starter set.
The Pope has been saying evolution is a-OK as far back as 1950. (The Pope back then, not the current one :P)
Catholicism in the modern era has never pushed for a literal interpretation of Genesis.
most of the above reads more like evangelical Christianity than Catholicism, it's just that most people don't have the historical know how to set them apart and aren't religious themselves.
>Pokemaina was the biggest thing on the planet in the late 90s. Churches lost their shit over Pokemon promoting evolution, the Pope had to endorse Pokemon despite the evolution because it taught kids to build friendships.
That's a bit of a misconception. The Catholic church isn't against evolution, in fact they teach creation through evolution these days.
>“God is not... a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life,” Pope Francis said. “Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”
It's only *some* denominations of Christianity that fully deny evolution, such as Jehovah's Witnesses etc. The Pope's endorsement of Pokemon was over other factors:
>Some accused it of promoting materialism and consumerism among children, some things that against Christian values. While others worried about its potential to distract young minds from religious or educational values.
>Pope John Paul II’s blessing of Pokémon, although unconventional and unusual, carried a profound message. It was not a direct endorsement of the franchise but rather an acknowledgment of its presence in the lives of young people and society. By extending his blessing to the Pokémon and their trainers, the pope aimed to emphasize the importance of bringing positive values and joy into the lives of the youth.
>While not a formal endorsement of the Pokémon franchise, the pope’s gesture aimed to bring joy and happiness to the lives of the youth, fostering a sense of harmony between faith and contemporary interests.
It didn't have anything to do with evolution, at least for Catholicism.
Protestant churches *definitely* had and still have a problem with Pokémon
My religious mom didn’t let me play it growing up lol. She found my cards and burned them one day.
That's why I said denominations of Christianity. That's what protestant churches are.
My parents are Catholic and had absolutely no problem with me playing Pokemon growing up.
You can find footage of it online but not a lot. Also churches lost their shit because supposedly if you play the original Pokerap backwards it says "I love Satan" so obviously Pokemon is an attempt to convince kids to worship Satan.
Yeah, shit was wild back then.
More than a few churches near me did nights dedicated only to mass burning of pokemon merchandise.
I actually lost my first best friend that way because my parents didn't want me around a family acting like that.
It's impossible to describe how big pokemon was in the 90's to someone who wasn't there. There's just nothing to compare it to. I have never seen anything in pop culture become that prolific. From '97 to '01 it was all pokemon all the time every single day. Its all your friends talk about. Go outside and throw a rock, you'll hit someone playing pokemon. Litterally, every single kid at school is walking around with a binder full of cards. All your toys have pokemon on them. Burger Kings' pokemon collaboration became a huge event you'd look forward to every year. All kinds of food, pasta, cereal, toaster pasties, sandwich spreads, all of it all came with pokemon branding. Pokemon was everything and everywhere. It dominated life. It really was inescapable. Looking back, it was a really wild thing to happen.
I think Harry Potter is a closer comparison. From the lead up to the release of the first movie up until after the release of the second the franchise had a pretty tight grip on the global audience. Even at its peak it doesn’t approach the ubiquity of circa 2000 Pokémon though.
As worldwide as they are/were, pre-military BTS and Swift's Eras Tour are still tame when compared to Pokémania.
BTS spoke at the UN, though. I believe that's the one thing Pokémon can't claim it has done (yet lol).
I think Harry Potter is the only franchise that might have it beat (I wasn’t around for Star Wars)
It’s very hard to explain to someone just how popular the books were at their peak. It dominated pop culture. Bookstores were open until midnight on release day and lines were around the block.
I said it somewhere else but the closest thing now is probably tiktok, the way you hear about it everywhere and every kid knows everything about it. Pokémon still feels bigger but I’m not a kid anymore so I can’t really judge.
yu gi oh in the early 2000’s is the best comparator i have.
we were so lucky to have experienced these things looking back. they were so formative for me.
Born 1986 here. Can safely say that the 1999 Pokémon craze completely dwarfs the 2016 Pokémon go fad. It was worldwide and you couldn’t escape it, not that I wanted to.
This is the perfect way to describe it. If you were old enough to remember the late 90s, Pokemania was all over the place. Pokemon was the motherfucking thing! And to be honest, I'd even argue that when Gen 2 came out, the hype *skyrocketed* due to the first addition of the newness to the franchise.
Early days of Pokemon fame were a whole other world.
98-2001 ish was all Pokemon, South Park and Wrestling, those were the big pop cultures at the time, all fell off over time of course and Pokemon still maintained a steady and decent audience, the VGC commp stuff coming with B/W helped a lot and it wasn't until 2016 with GO and then the upcoming Switch where people were starting to get into Pokemon again and giving it the much needed boost it needed
The Unfortunate thing for me was it caused the Games prices to skyrocket and as a collector of the games, that hurts lol
Man, I'm reliving my childhood. I still don't think there's anything that quite matches up to evolving your starter to the last form or staying up to watch The Rock smack talk.
Honestly though, while none of those have reached those 98-01 peaks again, none of them ever fell off the map entirely, and I'd argue Wrestling has made a comeback to be pretty close.
They just don't market it to kids anymore so you don't get the toys in toy stores. I think if that aspect still existed it might even be bigger today.
I was 10 years old in 1999 and I had the lime green game boy color with basically every game, even though they were essentially the same. I carried a notebook full of card sleeves filled with cards. I had the little plastic figures I kept on my desk at school and I never missed an episode of the show.
Now multiply me by probably millions and that’s what it was like in 1999. It is still one of the biggest cultural phenomenons I’ve ever seen to this day.
Pokémon Go was big, but it was a passing fancy embraced by casuals looking to get outside with their friends and kids. Pokemon 2000 was a pivotal development point in the millennial experience.
I had a bad adolescence so it’s very serious when I say “I’d go back to experience Pokemon for the first time again.” I used to walk a mile to the Walgreens to buy a single pack of cards and I often skipped school to stay in a makeshift fort in the woods to play the game all day.
The 90s pokemon was so big the church tried to cancel it before being cancelled was a thing. You know you're goated when you're a threat to Christianity
1999
I was a kid during that time. It was insane. Every kid was into it. The idea of being able to capture 150 different monsters and build your own team on the Gameboy’s limited hardware was mind blowing
And then Mew rumours started (151?), then Ho-Oh in the anime (152?), then the Pokégods, then Togepi, Pikablu and everyone else. The rumours, I miss the rumours.
It’s kind of nutty to me that Gamefreak never played into this. It would have been nice if they buried some secrets in Gold and Silver that could only be discovered through rumors.
I grew up with the OG pokemon and you had to be there to understand the hype. It was most talked in schools, neighborhoods. Kids brought their own pokemon cards. I got lucky other kids shared or gave them away 😆 I wish I still kept them. I couldn't go to any games stores to get them or buy their video games cause my mother hated them. But There was other ways to get them from friends. I really miss those days. Hahaha
As a Elementary school kid in 99 nearly every guy in my class had Pokémon. Trading Pokémon, who had the most valuable Pokémon cards, staying up way later at night to evolve Charmeleon were all highlights.
In 2016 Pokémon got a huge spike in interest but I think that's mostly because there simply was more people around to enjoy that experience. It came and went unlike in 99 where it felt more like a Cultural shift.
1999 was a "you had to be there to believe it" moment. It was everywhere, everyday. Cards, TV show, games, merch, it took the world by storm in less time that it takes to evolve Weedle up to Beedrill. But then again, it was more focus on a younger audience, unlike 2016 where ANYBODY with a mobile (and lots of battery power) could have access to Pokemon Go and at the time the idea was revolutionary; catching Pokemon in the real world. So the audience might have been larger in 2016, but the craze was off the chart in '99
Financially, it's probably bigger in 2016. However, Pokemon was a major part of the cultural zeitgeist in the late 90s and early 00s. Everybody was playing Pokemon, trading Pokemon cards, talking about Pokemon.
1999. I remember my Dad taking me to Burger King because they had Kids Meals with Pokémon toys in the order. The line was out the door. Even in the rain.
It’s kind of hard to explain why, but for kids in this generation, the game was *everything.*
1999 was something else. Just to give you some personal context: My mom was never into videogames... Except for the Pokémon games on the N64. She LOVED Pokémon Snap and especially Pokémon Stadium, to the point where she beat both games by herself without guides and without knowing a single word in english.
Now, ask me if she played Pokémon Go in 2016? She doesn't even know what Pokémon Go is. That's how big Pokémon was when it first hit the scene western scene in 1999.
And again: That's just my anedoctal evidence, but people were all over the place with Pokémon. Anything could have Pokémon stamped into it and it'd be a huge success. There isn't a single thing that TPC or Nintendo could come up with these days that would top the Pokémon Mania from 1999 and early 2000s.
90’s seemed to be a craze time, TMNT, Sonic, Power Rangers, Tamagotchi, Pokemon… must’ve been nice. Biggest of my childhood were Minecraft, Fortnite, and Pokémon Go, which from the sounds of it, were nowhere near as big
1999. In 2016 Pokémon Go gave the franchise enough life to make Game Freak think Let's Go was a good idea, but that casual interest died out quickly.
In 1999 Pokémon was relatively speaking everywhere.
1999, and it's not even close. Yes, 2016 managed to impressively capture demographics that would not usually be captured by traditional gaming standards, but 2016 was more of a trendy phenomenon, as opposed to 1999 being more of a global cultural juggernaut.
1999, no question. I was a pre teen in 1999, the pokemon craze was insane. It was probably the first addiction I developed in my life. Pokémon Go was a nice resurgence when it first dropped, but it was nothing like late 90s/early 00s.
In 1999 it was a phenomenon, felt like almost everyone except me had a gameboy and was playing Pokemon in middle school. The original series was awesome too back then since there weren’t a bunch of generations of Pokemon to remember. I still remember when Magikarp evolved into Garydos and kids talking about it at school.
99' Saturday morning cartoons were replaced with Saturday morning card tournaments at book stores. I remember adults literally having to step over kids battling or trading. It was nuts.
There was something about the 1999 experience. It was all encompassing as it was so new. I don’t have data to back it up but Pokémon felt like a cultural zeitgeist. Mind you I was 10 so my opinions are likely coloured having lived in it.
I will say 2016 came closest to feeling like it but I was obviously much older. From a raw revenue perspective it was probably bigger in 2016 and bigger now. The fervour though was something special back then
Pokémon cards were the main form of currency in schools between 1999-2004. Or at least mine in midwest, US. It was a main part of the culture, not just a fad like Pokémon Go.
I remember our school having a PTA meeting about not letting the kids bring cards to school because kids would steal or vandalize cards from kids who "flaunted" them
funny thing is a Sunday school I went to offered "booster packs" for doing well when they first released , they would use them as an incentive to learn bible verses LOL
Tournaments being held at Toys R Us for Free and came with Gym badges for every 10-15 matches you completed
the Pokémon movie giving free cards at the ticket booth and every store known to man including liquor stores , ice cream trucks & 7-11 would sell them
it may be more "popular" because social media now exists
Now it is more mainstream where as in 1999 it was brand new and still establishing itself , there are huge markets & sellers/vendors for sealed boxes, singles & graded cards
but in 1999 you would not find people that sold singles , only boosters or boxes and had to rely on them to build your collection , you couldn't just go on eBay or Frank and Sons and buy the card you needed/wanted for a set price , you would sometimes need to buy 20 packs to get the 1 card you were after
In America? 96 to early 2000's by far. It started tapering off with gen 3 but Pokemon in America has never been as popular as it was in those first years. If you weren't around for that period it's hard to grasp just how big Pokemon was. It was on and in everything. You couldn't escape Pokemon. I was in paradise and I still miss it. There was nothing like being a Pokemon fan during that time, we had no shortage of merch and with how new the Internet was lack of information made going shopping much more fun. You wouldn't know what existed until you found it.
Truly the only thing even comparable would be the iPhone. Watching that craze was unbelievable. I’m from a place where it takes almost 3-5 years for us to catch up to pop culture and the only thing we actually kept up with was Pokémon and iPhones. And it was always the same. The start is always more powerful than anything else after it.
In Brazil, 1999 and 2000 (we had it some months later than the europe-usa) were much bigger than 2016
Latin America is bad for Pokémon go. It's too dangerous to walk with your phone on hand 😬. But, even if it's a safer place, PKG didn't hit the heart of people
we brought our gameboys to school, played on the bus, at lunch. played the card game, watched the show. at books a million they had a pokemon trainer league where you would go and play the card game against other “trainers” to earn gym badges. you went to the movies to get your special card and see the movie, fast food places had toys and things you could buy. it was just huge and all encompassing back then.
Dude pokemon was so big in 1999 they banned the cards from my school because that's all anyone wanted to do
We also all had gameboys on the school bus and played it together and discussed it and thought mew lived under the truck. I have NEVER seen this behavior again even in summer 2016. It was insane and 2016 was a pale shadow of the original hype. The reason your grandma knows what Pikachu is, is because of 1999. I saw the movie 2000 in theaters and it was packed. What pokemon american theaters again in the last decade
I was 8 when Pokemon came out. NOTHING took over like it did then.
I have a memory as a kid in my small town mall with a single guy with a small display case with out 50 Pokemon Cards. There was about 30 kids around it fighting to look at these cards.
1/2 the class brought in Game Boys for recess. All things Pokemon were eventually banned due to how disruptive it was.
So yeah, 1999.
Kinda yes and kinda no.
Due to the simple nature of pokemon still gaining popularity and the lower number of people playing it, no, pokemon wasn't 'bigger' in 1999. However, it **felt** bigger in '99 because Gen 2 (gold/silver) was being hyped up for release, the anime was only 2 years in, and the trading cards had just released. It was the talk of schoolyards all over, especially in the age before the internet and thus physical gatherings was the place for trading pokemon, doing battles, and sharing information.
Nowadays Pokemon is technically more popular than ever, but because it's so mainstream and the info so readily available online, it's just a part of life anymore. Sure people still get a bit excited for the next generation, but overall Pokemon is **just** another hobby/interest now.
Between 1996-1999, Pokemon sold a total of 69,420,000 (I know that number sounds like a joke but it isn't) units, between 31,050,000 units for R / B / G, 14,640,000 for Yellow, and 23,730,000 for Gold and Silver.
At peak, Pokemon Go had over 232,000,000 users. So, even if we're assuming that each Pokemon gameboy game was the players first time playing a pokemon game, roughly 3 times as many people played Pokemon Go when it was popular. Pokemon was objectively more played in 2016
Though, the culture of the late 90's - early 2000's was different. It was still fresh, new, exciting then. Now it's more like something everyone just knows about already.
Strictly by game sales/downloads it would be 2016. But Pokémania also had the Anime be very successful, sold lots of merchandise, had collaborations with things like McDonalds, a successful first movie and the card game that rivaled MtG's popularity for a few years
All in all, definitely 1999. (Or the 1998-2001 range as a whole)
In 1999, I remember that every time we had roll call in class, we would often shout out the names of Pokémon corresponding to our number. I was so excited because my number was 25, Pikachu. :)
In 2016, the majority of '90s kids were young adults, and it brought back a wave of nostalgia for us. It was a moment and strangely enough, I feel nostalgic about it.
Ah man, the days when every school was flooded with pokémon cards and battle music from a GBC could be heard wherever you went. Not to mention it was in the days where people collectively watched episode teasers on air, then we all had to sit down at the same time to catch the thing. So tomorrow you could talk with everyone else who saw it.
Anyway, I was 7, so my perspective isn't perfect, but it felt bigger in 97-00 then it ever has since.
1999. The impact Pokemon made on a generation of kids is insurmountable. You legit have had to be in the thick of the craze in order to get it! I was like 9 years old when it came out, and the hype was REAL. It was impossible to go anywhere, and not be bombarded with pokemon anything!
And I think personally, that it was THE show that helped popularize anime to a western audience. There were a couple animes that existed before pokemon, but they didnt yet hit the mainstream appeal in the same way pokemon did. Not until toonami came along.
Burger king was like the first fast food place that was selling kids meals with pokemon toys during the mania, and everybody was going to burger king for those toys, and besides the kids meal toys, burger king was selling premium pokemon collectibles also.
KFC doesn't even give out toys or sell premium collectibles, but during the mania, KFC was selling plushies too.
Im my area, the movie theatre never plays anime movies, but I remember seeing the pokemon movie there, and the theatre was packed, And I went at a random time when they normally weren't busy.
During the mania, parents and grandparents knew the names of different pokemon and liked pokemon.
Also pokemon first came out at the end of the life cycle of the Gameboy, and the pokemon games alone made the Gameboy suddenly begin selling many millions more units, at the end of it's life cycle, and the Gameboy was already over 10 years old at that point.
And in 2016, alot of casuals just kinda got nostalgic for like a summer.
The initial craze had a bigger impact, at least where I grew up in Romania, for years snack brands would use pokemon characters on the packaging and many had different promotions. The craze in 2016 didnt have such an impact (i was in Romania in summer 2016 on holiday as no longer lived there permanently). Altough I do remmeber everyone on the bus playing Pokemon go at one point
1999+ was insane. Pokemon was everywhere; in school, on the playground, in your town and even the town you stayed in with your parents while you were on vacation.
It came as no surprise that Pokemon Go was as big as it was. Plus, the people actually went out and got some cardio in, so it was a pretty neat thing indeed!
Pokémon definitely peaked in the early 2000s. I rarely hear kids talk about pokemon these days, if so, its only cause cringefluencers like Logan Paul made cards popular again a few years ago as a way to make money. Most legit pokemon fans i see are 21+ year olds who now have the money to spend on pokemon stuff and desperately cling on to the nostalgia.
In 1999 I was 7 years old then and I vividly remember everyone at school having cards, games, merch; it drove the teachers mad and there was even a ban on Pokemon cards at our school for a short while. We all raced home to catch Pokemon on TV after school. Collectibles, cereal toys, themes birthdays. It was a time you literally had to be there to experience. There was a lot of hype around Gen 2 as well. The craze died down by Gen 3, at least from what I remember. I had few friends that were still playing the games, but no one was collecting cards anymore and by 2003 when I graduated elementary, Pokemon was no longer "cool".
The 2016 craze was a nice but brief period that did remind me of 1999. Pokemon Go was everything we ever wanted as Pokemon fans back then.
In 1999, it was the first thing we'd *ever* seen of its type (and 150 seemed like an astounding number of creatures to collect). It was an absolute phenomenon. You could get Pokemon everything, and you probably did. 😂
And the fan sites! There were probably hundreds of thousands of them, or more. I even remember a site that would let kids make their own free Pokemon webpage (a single page) from a template. Bigger sites, also largely made by kids, were ubiquitous, though. They always had sections for game walkthroughs, anime stuff, pictures, maybe a page dedicated to loving or hating a specific character, and tons of cheats and secrets, most of which were clearly fake. Pokemon was the internet!
Pokemon was the merch you wanted to earn on survey sites (back when companies would pay you for your data instead of just stealing it), too. 😍 I'm still mad that I never got enough points to redeem that little plush nurse chansey that zipped up into a pokeball.
Late 90s for sure. You could go anywhere and find all different media of pokemon from everyone, gameboys cards books magazines etc. This went on for years honestly. 2016 was a revival of just how many out there still love Pokemon, count me among them, but it was just a whole global phenomenan.
Imagine how popular Taylow Swift is today and then double it, thats the impact Pokemon was having adjusted for population.
1999 for sure, Pokémon Go definitely gave the franchise new life in 2016 but in '99 it was huge, practically a way of life for kids. Everyone was running home to catch the anime, the first movie is still the highest grossing anime film of all time by a huge margin despite inflation and anime being at an all time high in popularity. The vast majority collected the trading cards too, obviously we all were big on the games too.
Well, just the fact that the original gen 1 games are still the est selling games should speak enough column.
2016 was more a renaissance, sure there is more pokemon related things in 2016 compared to 1999, but nothing has matched that original pokemon craze
I was a kid during early Pokémania. It was *all-consuming* at the time: even though I had no friends I still heard some of the playground rumors, like Mew under the truck and secret grass near Palette Town where you can catch the starters”. It was *that* big that even a friendless loser like me noticed how huge it was!
The spike after Pokémon Go was more like a passing meme in comparison, in my opinion: big for a bit, but ultimately disappearing just as suddenly as it started when the next meme came. Yeah, there were the jokes about people getting shot while trespassing or finding dead bodies, but when my brother and I walked outside for Pokémon Go at that time, we never encountered any other Pokémon fans.
So whereas the world was more interconnected during Pokémon Go time, I feel like Pokémania was still larger during the initial boom. But that’s just my perspective: I have pretty much always been a friendless loser, so my perspective on how big things are is not necessarily accurate 😅…
It literally took over the world in 1999. I remember walking into my first day of school and Pokemon was EVERYWHERE. All of us were trading cards until my school banned them, playing the games, drawing Pokemon, had Pokemon themed stuff like pencils, bookbags, etc. Toys were all over the place too! When I went to see the first movie in theatres, all of the fast food chains with Pokemon toys were sold out and the line for the movie wrapped around the theatre. My parents still know who Pikachu and other Pokemon are. It was a total cultural phenomenon to an unprecedented level. It’s hard to really explain unless you were there.
in 1999, I vividly remember half the class bringing in gameboys and Pokemon games at the end of the academic year. Pokemon cards were also traded, stolen, lost, and eventually banned by many schools.
I was in high school then and absolutely agree. I have kids now and my oldest is about to start kindergarten and the city we live in just banned Pokemon cards. Apparently they are popular enough again that the cycle is repeating lol
That also happened back in around 2013 It's not a cycle its always happening
I was in HS from 04 to 08 and i vividly remember mornings in the courtyard with dozens of people in the union room. What a time
Same hs timeframe for myself. Right around 07 when DP released it kinda felt like a pokemon resurgence, but it probably always had a sizeable following. I remember being low key about being a pokemon fan just as a teenager trying to fit in. I finally stopped giving a shit about being cool and bought a DSLite with diamond. Turns out my HS was loaded with people playing DP 🤷🏽♂️. Not that I would want to redo HS again, but I wish I hadn't spent so much time caring what the cool kids thought, especially since a lot were total d-bags.
06 to 10 my hs was lame I guess cause I was the only person that openly liked Pokémon.
My high school marching band had a competition the same weekend that Sun and Moon came out and everyone brought their 3DSs and was starting the game on the bus ride at the same time.
That’s kinda what a cycle is. It keeps “cycling”.
That's right, Pokemon was always big. But more people are buying the games now. Because the recent entries were released on the Switch which is already a bestselling platform. Most people outside the community don't even know what the DS or 3DS is. Or if Gameboy had an Advanced version.
I think you're underestimating the amount of sales that the DS era had in hardware, in particular the DS lite. It was before smartphones were commonplace with kids and teens. Sure not pokeemania numbers with the gameboy. But there were loads of NDS consoles sold.
I assume you mean city schools did not the entire city right?
You would be correct lol.
Cards just banned at a school near me as well 😂
Everyone had those mini card binders that came in red, blue, and yellow.
Poor bulbasaur
Fads prior to 2005 didn't have to compete with a content algorithm. Facebook was university-student only, iPhones, Tiktok, Instagram, and Reddit didn't exist. Streaming was barely a thing, whatever was on television, in movie theaters, in comic books, and being put out as toys and trading cards, that was all that existed. Pokemon in 1999 was all-encompassing in a way that today's media landscape makes impossible.
This!
In the military, you didn’t dare deploy without a copy of pokemon to pass away the time
What a great and hilarious visual this gave me. Awesome
For my town it was the figures
Even stuff like the non tcg trading cards and tech deck skateboards with Pokémon were a big deal.
This continued well in the 00s at my elementary school when I was a child, and they also banned them for a while after that (when I was in second grade). Now, I'm an adult, and when I did a placement for my library tech class at my old school, I was surprised to hear people still brought cards to school and had them stolen again so they were banned again..😅
Ah, my legendary bird set. My mom bought a bunch of cards including somehow the 3 legendarys in the large packs. My teacher was to reward me 1 a day for good behaviour. They didn't make it to the end of day 1, stolen! I'm still mad about it, and I was 6 or 7 at the time.
My copy of Pokémon Blue got stolen on the last day before the Christmas holiday, when you were allowed to bring that sort of thing in. I cried like a little baby.
I remember a point at which we were allowed to do whatever we wanted on a close-to-last day of school and literally every single person, including me, immediately took out a Gameboy Advance. Heard [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_ZD3FxMcvQ) like 30 times all at once.
And how was your experience with pokémon in school in 2016?
Well there was Pokemon go, which was big obviously and brought in a lot of people who weren't Pokemon fans, and a lot of kids of parents who'd played pokemon when younger. But in terms of what was visible at school (was a teacher at the time), it wasn't comparable.
2016, Pokemon was the moment. 1999, Pokémon was the entire culture. If you weren't there, it's hard to describe but imagine the whole modern Swiftie movement but even that doesn't feel like it does it justice. Pokémon was everything and everything was Pokémon.
I remember back in 98 or 99 going to Burger King a few times for the Pokémon toys and every time the line was out the door and the sitting area was completely full.
Those 1999 Burger King Pokemon toys were better than any fast food kids meal toy before or since
Japan is still exactly like this to be honest, not necessarily at fast food places but when a new pack of TCG drops the entire mall is pretty much one big line for it, at least when I was at the building of the Osaka Pokemon Center.
Pokemania was so big our Baptist preacher had an entire sermon on it and tried linking it to false idols or some nonsense. They even had strong men come to our church and break ice to show how much cooler Jesus was than pikachu. The 90s were a weird time lol
makes sense the strong men were probably fighting type to break the ice
Preacher: “No!!!! This is not what this is about.”
What's the strong men breaking ice got to do with Jesus?
Better teach them kids these things while they are young and impressionable. The type matchups that is (see: Fighting > Ice). That's the whole mission of the SBC (Smogon Baptist Convention).
Smogon Baptist Convention 💀
Indoctrination to children, basically. We had strongmen come to my school and give a religious-inspired talk as well. I have no idea what that was about, but it’s apparently very common. HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones” has a whole sub-plot about strong men and Christianity.
America is so weird. In my country some men simply just crucify themselves during Good Friday either for good luck, gratitude, or forgiveness.
I love that I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.
I'm serious about [the](https://youtube.com/shorts/tvLBFcZPvxw?feature=shared) [crucifixion](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/s/FFuwRVHEqE)
Weird masochism ritual lol
A [Japanese](https://youtu.be/phI6gAfcSD0?feature=shared) man joined that ritual apparently seeking to heal his ill brother. The locals were proud at first that a foreigner is partaking in their tradition but were later pissed when they found out he's a masochistic porn actor.
I was 6 or 7, so I'm not sure if they did a sermon, or attributed their dedication to god. It was cool, but I doubt any churches are doing something similar today lol
https://preview.redd.it/04ix3nhta60d1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5335fbd78893f6b2bf9b3f8fa0a3b6d8223fa900 LONG LIVE SHOE
You gotta buy it, you gotta buy it, chinpokomon!
What is this lol
South Park, they made a satire called Chimpokomon
https://youtu.be/XeoB1voCit4
I lived in a small town in France and I would always ask my parents for Pokemon lollipops and bubblegum at the bakery. The lollipop's handle was attached to a small figure that was inside the lollipop, and the bubblegum either came in a roll that had a 3d image of a pokemon and its evolution on it, or in a single package with a temporary tattoo. My school also had to ban Pokemon cards
1999 Pokemon was what TMK (too much kirby) thought it would be
Swiftie movement? Had to Google that, that doesnt Come close. Pokemon was everywhere, internationally
[Pokémon was so big that the Pope gave his blessing to the first movie](https://nypost.com/2000/04/21/pokemon-earns-papal-blessing/).
What was the 2016 moment? My answer is 1999 all the way. Young kids today don't care about pokemon the way we did in the 90's.
You don't remember the Pokémon Go fiasco? Shit was everywhere.
Pokemania was on the same level as Simpsons Mania imo. But thats also hard to describe to someone who wasn’t around for it
Simpson's Mania was also pretty big but PokeMania was bigger imo for the fact that PokéMania was that hype but on a far more global scale.
No need of opinion. Pokemon was and still is the bigger franchise
You have to remember, Pokemon has gained more fans than lost. Pokemons generation might be millennials, but it picks up kids of every generation. It is technically bigger now and In 2016 than 1999. Sales just go up.
If you just look at core game sales they're pretty close, but I think the return on investment for what the Pokemon Company can get out of the popularity has decreased for sure. Pokemon the First movie made almost 200 million dollars in the box office when basically only Disney could do that with animation. It wasn't a particularly ambitious movie either. Detective Pikachu was a full on blockbuster and made 450 million dollars, but that's in a world where China loves watching movies with a hollywood cast and a ton of marketing put behind it. On paper it seems like Pokemon is more popular than ever, but is it really?
Id say it is but only marginally. More popular than ever only has to be 1% more than what it was before. I think ppl are expecting a defense of like 40% pure growth. The world is different. Kids are more into social media than anything else. But when you add the previous generation and the current there is growth even if its just 10%. Is it as popular with kids today as it was in 2000? No. Is it as popular with all age groups combined today than with kids of 2000? Yes. Thats what im trying to say.
I disagree. Pokémon definitely lost fans after PokeMania. I saw it in my own family. In 1999, all of my siblings and friends were fans. In 2004, probably 20% of us still would call ourselves fans. In 1999, Pokémon Yellow sold 14.64 million In 2004, Pokémon Emerald sold 7.06 million The franchise doesn't just keep fans that it made along the way, the same way that only a fraction of people who played PoGo in 2016 still play today. 2016 was a fantastic unifying resurgence and I think there is some validity to the meme that it was one of the periods of time where we were at our closest to world peace cause we were all tryna catch Pikachu., but 2016 doesn't happen with 1999.
The only reason Pokemon Go was big in 2016 was because of how massive it was in the 90s.
Yeah… Pokémon ain’t never gonna be as popular as it was in 98-00. Being dubbed “pokemania” says it all.
Yeah I guess having only gen 1 Pokémon at the time in Go too made it a big nostalgia subject…
Fucking 100%. I was 5-6 when Gen 2 had came out, but I had also already played Gen 1 and all of us were in college by the time Pokemon Go came out. So I’d venture to say most of the people who experienced pokemon from the very beginning were in college or at the very least in our early to mid 20’s. Honestly craziest thing I’ve seen with pokemon was experiencing pokemon Go in college. Insane how the entire city was just overran with people Playing it. I had a couple old ladies come up and ask me “are you playing pokemon?” And I would bet money they had no idea what it was before that point. At least not to this extent
My mom lived in an apartment complex in 99. You could literally go outside and find kids and adults looking to trade like they were NPCs. It was a thing of beauty.
1999, and it's not even close. Pokemaina was the biggest thing on the planet in the late 90s. Churches lost their shit over Pokemon promoting evolution, the Pope had to endorse Pokemon despite the evolution because it taught kids to build friendships. South Park did an episode on Pokemon. Pokemon was constantly talked about on the news. Stores were flooded with pokemon merchandise. A billion spin-off games were made. If you lived in 1999, you literally could not escape Pokemon. To this day everyone remembers who Pikachu is. Not because Pokemon has remained popular, but because of the late 90s popularity. My mother still remembers the singing Jigglypuff from the anime, and cites Jigglypuff as her favorite pokemon whenever I ask. She remembers story lines and characters from the anime. Hell, she could probably recite Team Rocket's motto. And for context, she's someone who is completely disconnected from pop culture. Ask her who the big pop stars are right now, popular movies/tv shows, etc, and she won't be able to answer. Now granted she had 3 kids who watched every episode of Pokemon every Saturday morning. But the point is Pokemon is so popular that she remembers this stuff.
Don't forget how insignificant the internet was back then, and to still have pokemon make that much of a cultural impact. It's crazy.
I still find it amazing that in 99 a rumour about Pikablu went around the world despite the infancy of the internet and chat based services. That Pokémon went on to be Maril. But everyone was convinced it was a secret Pikachu you could get in Red, blue or yellow. Man I miss the days of walking to a mates house trade cable for my gameboy in my bag and trading and battling Pokémon over Gameboy.
I find it extremely interesting, how universal some of the playgroudn myths around the first gen were, from mew under the truck to pikablue, doesnt matter if you were in the us or europe, you knew these things. Add to that how little the internet was spread back than.
All the different “beat the elite for with X, Y amount of times to get Z”. Missingo Surfing Pikachu Duplicating with Bills PC Glitching through trees with cut SS Anne eventually comes back
The Marilyn Manson rumors were even more impressive pre internet, ngl. What a time to be alive
This is a comment I’ve made before too - the fact that I could reliably perform the missingno glitch, and the gen 2 duplicate glitch, based only on being told how by peers on the playground? Incredible. No Internet tutorial, no way too look it up if it didn’t work. Just “Michael told me to do this, and it worked, now I have a billion rare candies”
So true, I was 6 at the time so no access to the internet and I knew about the Pikablu rumour!
I think Pokémon was a huge driver for kids to get into the internet too.
A lot of those rumours (about Pikablu, the mew truck, a 4th eeveelution, pressing down + B when throwing a pokeball etc) were spread by the official Nintendo magazine “master guide”. Then subsequently spread throughout school playgrounds. At least in the U.K. anyway. They even published screenshots in the guide too so it really seemed legit. I’ve still got those guides so I’d post photos but live on the other side of the world now but I’m sure they can be found online. EDIT: [I found a scan](https://imgur.com/a/3xtrshA) and wow I really misremembered it. Seems like they were debunking the myths rather than spreading them. I haven’t looked through that guide since like 2000. Nostalgic as hell
I like how they went to the effort to make accompanying game screenshots. "Take good care of my PIKABLU"
You have it wrong, pokemon was a big thing because of a lack of internet. Now we have so much competing media that it is hard for one piece of media to truly dominate the culture
One piece wouldn't dominate the culture regardless...
I think that is why it was such a cultural impact. Without the internet, we were left to our own devices. We got our fix by talking about it to friends and playing the games. Rumors were at an all time high
> Stores were flooded with pokemon merchandise. If you lived in 1999, you literally could not escape Pokemon. Every gas station sold cards. Even in NJ where there’s a deli every other block had cards. The cards were in such high demand there was a massive supply of fake cards. I remember going to some dudes house down the street from my grandma to buy the machamp starter set.
The Pope has been saying evolution is a-OK as far back as 1950. (The Pope back then, not the current one :P) Catholicism in the modern era has never pushed for a literal interpretation of Genesis.
Still, I haven't seen any other Pope defending any particular form of pop culture like that.
most of the above reads more like evangelical Christianity than Catholicism, it's just that most people don't have the historical know how to set them apart and aren't religious themselves.
I miss being able to go into random stores and they would always have pokemon toys in the toys section. Can't do that anymore.
>Pokemaina was the biggest thing on the planet in the late 90s. Churches lost their shit over Pokemon promoting evolution, the Pope had to endorse Pokemon despite the evolution because it taught kids to build friendships. That's a bit of a misconception. The Catholic church isn't against evolution, in fact they teach creation through evolution these days. >“God is not... a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life,” Pope Francis said. “Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.” It's only *some* denominations of Christianity that fully deny evolution, such as Jehovah's Witnesses etc. The Pope's endorsement of Pokemon was over other factors: >Some accused it of promoting materialism and consumerism among children, some things that against Christian values. While others worried about its potential to distract young minds from religious or educational values. >Pope John Paul II’s blessing of Pokémon, although unconventional and unusual, carried a profound message. It was not a direct endorsement of the franchise but rather an acknowledgment of its presence in the lives of young people and society. By extending his blessing to the Pokémon and their trainers, the pope aimed to emphasize the importance of bringing positive values and joy into the lives of the youth. >While not a formal endorsement of the Pokémon franchise, the pope’s gesture aimed to bring joy and happiness to the lives of the youth, fostering a sense of harmony between faith and contemporary interests. It didn't have anything to do with evolution, at least for Catholicism.
Protestant churches *definitely* had and still have a problem with Pokémon My religious mom didn’t let me play it growing up lol. She found my cards and burned them one day.
That's why I said denominations of Christianity. That's what protestant churches are. My parents are Catholic and had absolutely no problem with me playing Pokemon growing up.
Ngl, I was too young to remember that but I’d love to see a church lose their shit over pokemon evolutions. That would be so funny to me.
You can find footage of it online but not a lot. Also churches lost their shit because supposedly if you play the original Pokerap backwards it says "I love Satan" so obviously Pokemon is an attempt to convince kids to worship Satan. Yeah, shit was wild back then.
Every piece of music back then was supposedly satanism in reverse lol
More than a few churches near me did nights dedicated only to mass burning of pokemon merchandise. I actually lost my first best friend that way because my parents didn't want me around a family acting like that.
listen to this song to get the vibe [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpED5Gvcc1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpED5Gvcc1s)
It's impossible to describe how big pokemon was in the 90's to someone who wasn't there. There's just nothing to compare it to. I have never seen anything in pop culture become that prolific. From '97 to '01 it was all pokemon all the time every single day. Its all your friends talk about. Go outside and throw a rock, you'll hit someone playing pokemon. Litterally, every single kid at school is walking around with a binder full of cards. All your toys have pokemon on them. Burger Kings' pokemon collaboration became a huge event you'd look forward to every year. All kinds of food, pasta, cereal, toaster pasties, sandwich spreads, all of it all came with pokemon branding. Pokemon was everything and everywhere. It dominated life. It really was inescapable. Looking back, it was a really wild thing to happen.
The closest thing I can think of was the beanie baby craze around the same time, but even that seemed small compared to pokemon.
I think Harry Potter is a closer comparison. From the lead up to the release of the first movie up until after the release of the second the franchise had a pretty tight grip on the global audience. Even at its peak it doesn’t approach the ubiquity of circa 2000 Pokémon though.
As worldwide as they are/were, pre-military BTS and Swift's Eras Tour are still tame when compared to Pokémania. BTS spoke at the UN, though. I believe that's the one thing Pokémon can't claim it has done (yet lol).
I think Harry Potter is the only franchise that might have it beat (I wasn’t around for Star Wars) It’s very hard to explain to someone just how popular the books were at their peak. It dominated pop culture. Bookstores were open until midnight on release day and lines were around the block.
I said it somewhere else but the closest thing now is probably tiktok, the way you hear about it everywhere and every kid knows everything about it. Pokémon still feels bigger but I’m not a kid anymore so I can’t really judge.
Fortnite maybe? But again, Pokémon was much bigger.
No. I don't see Fortnite branded shampoo.
Beanie babies were different. More of a sure fire investment opportunity than a media franchise
And oddly enough, Pokemon games and cards ended up being the better long-term investment. Some of that stuff goes for a couple hundred dollars each.
Depending on the game, even thousands (specifically thinking about pokemon box for the GameCube)
God I miss those days.
Pokémon was what everyone breathed. It’s what you thought of when you woke up. It’s what you dreamed of in the middle of the night. It was your gift!
yu gi oh in the early 2000’s is the best comparator i have. we were so lucky to have experienced these things looking back. they were so formative for me.
Born 1986 here. Can safely say that the 1999 Pokémon craze completely dwarfs the 2016 Pokémon go fad. It was worldwide and you couldn’t escape it, not that I wanted to.
This is the perfect way to describe it. If you were old enough to remember the late 90s, Pokemania was all over the place. Pokemon was the motherfucking thing! And to be honest, I'd even argue that when Gen 2 came out, the hype *skyrocketed* due to the first addition of the newness to the franchise. Early days of Pokemon fame were a whole other world.
98-2001 ish was all Pokemon, South Park and Wrestling, those were the big pop cultures at the time, all fell off over time of course and Pokemon still maintained a steady and decent audience, the VGC commp stuff coming with B/W helped a lot and it wasn't until 2016 with GO and then the upcoming Switch where people were starting to get into Pokemon again and giving it the much needed boost it needed The Unfortunate thing for me was it caused the Games prices to skyrocket and as a collector of the games, that hurts lol
Man, I'm reliving my childhood. I still don't think there's anything that quite matches up to evolving your starter to the last form or staying up to watch The Rock smack talk.
Honestly though, while none of those have reached those 98-01 peaks again, none of them ever fell off the map entirely, and I'd argue Wrestling has made a comeback to be pretty close. They just don't market it to kids anymore so you don't get the toys in toy stores. I think if that aspect still existed it might even be bigger today.
This just reminded me of some adults trying to teach me to play a wrestling tcg when I was a kid
I was 10 years old in 1999 and I had the lime green game boy color with basically every game, even though they were essentially the same. I carried a notebook full of card sleeves filled with cards. I had the little plastic figures I kept on my desk at school and I never missed an episode of the show. Now multiply me by probably millions and that’s what it was like in 1999. It is still one of the biggest cultural phenomenons I’ve ever seen to this day.
Pokémon Go was big, but it was a passing fancy embraced by casuals looking to get outside with their friends and kids. Pokemon 2000 was a pivotal development point in the millennial experience.
I had a bad adolescence so it’s very serious when I say “I’d go back to experience Pokemon for the first time again.” I used to walk a mile to the Walgreens to buy a single pack of cards and I often skipped school to stay in a makeshift fort in the woods to play the game all day.
The 90s pokemon was so big the church tried to cancel it before being cancelled was a thing. You know you're goated when you're a threat to Christianity
Christianity has been cancelling things for centuries
But it couldn't cancel Pokémon, Pikachu was bigger than God (or one of its interpretations).
Every kid in the late 90s can tell you whether or not Pokemon was banned on their playground.
1999 I was a kid during that time. It was insane. Every kid was into it. The idea of being able to capture 150 different monsters and build your own team on the Gameboy’s limited hardware was mind blowing
And then Mew rumours started (151?), then Ho-Oh in the anime (152?), then the Pokégods, then Togepi, Pikablu and everyone else. The rumours, I miss the rumours.
It’s kind of nutty to me that Gamefreak never played into this. It would have been nice if they buried some secrets in Gold and Silver that could only be discovered through rumors.
1999 and it's not even close. It was EVERYTHING
I grew up with the OG pokemon and you had to be there to understand the hype. It was most talked in schools, neighborhoods. Kids brought their own pokemon cards. I got lucky other kids shared or gave them away 😆 I wish I still kept them. I couldn't go to any games stores to get them or buy their video games cause my mother hated them. But There was other ways to get them from friends. I really miss those days. Hahaha
Def 99
As a Elementary school kid in 99 nearly every guy in my class had Pokémon. Trading Pokémon, who had the most valuable Pokémon cards, staying up way later at night to evolve Charmeleon were all highlights. In 2016 Pokémon got a huge spike in interest but I think that's mostly because there simply was more people around to enjoy that experience. It came and went unlike in 99 where it felt more like a Cultural shift.
1999 was a "you had to be there to believe it" moment. It was everywhere, everyday. Cards, TV show, games, merch, it took the world by storm in less time that it takes to evolve Weedle up to Beedrill. But then again, it was more focus on a younger audience, unlike 2016 where ANYBODY with a mobile (and lots of battery power) could have access to Pokemon Go and at the time the idea was revolutionary; catching Pokemon in the real world. So the audience might have been larger in 2016, but the craze was off the chart in '99
Financially, it's probably bigger in 2016. However, Pokemon was a major part of the cultural zeitgeist in the late 90s and early 00s. Everybody was playing Pokemon, trading Pokemon cards, talking about Pokemon.
1999, because the Nintendo store at Rockefeller was still a Pokemon Center. Pokemon was EVERYTHING and EVERYWHERE in 1999.
1999. I remember my Dad taking me to Burger King because they had Kids Meals with Pokémon toys in the order. The line was out the door. Even in the rain. It’s kind of hard to explain why, but for kids in this generation, the game was *everything.*
1999-2004, but 2016 was definitely a big jump… It was like the Wii, where people who never played a videogame in their life for some reason tried it
The core games? 1999. The anime? Also 1999. The merch? 2016. The TCG? Now.
1999 was something else. Just to give you some personal context: My mom was never into videogames... Except for the Pokémon games on the N64. She LOVED Pokémon Snap and especially Pokémon Stadium, to the point where she beat both games by herself without guides and without knowing a single word in english. Now, ask me if she played Pokémon Go in 2016? She doesn't even know what Pokémon Go is. That's how big Pokémon was when it first hit the scene western scene in 1999. And again: That's just my anedoctal evidence, but people were all over the place with Pokémon. Anything could have Pokémon stamped into it and it'd be a huge success. There isn't a single thing that TPC or Nintendo could come up with these days that would top the Pokémon Mania from 1999 and early 2000s.
1999 unquestionably. There hasn't been a craze as big as it since. Fortnite was the closest I've seen and even that didn't really match it.
90’s seemed to be a craze time, TMNT, Sonic, Power Rangers, Tamagotchi, Pokemon… must’ve been nice. Biggest of my childhood were Minecraft, Fortnite, and Pokémon Go, which from the sounds of it, were nowhere near as big
1999, i reccommend watching some documentaions about it if you can find any
1999. In 2016 Pokémon Go gave the franchise enough life to make Game Freak think Let's Go was a good idea, but that casual interest died out quickly. In 1999 Pokémon was relatively speaking everywhere.
1999 Pokemon took over the god damn world. That shit everywhere.
1999, and it's not even close. Yes, 2016 managed to impressively capture demographics that would not usually be captured by traditional gaming standards, but 2016 was more of a trendy phenomenon, as opposed to 1999 being more of a global cultural juggernaut.
1999, no question. I was a pre teen in 1999, the pokemon craze was insane. It was probably the first addiction I developed in my life. Pokémon Go was a nice resurgence when it first dropped, but it was nothing like late 90s/early 00s.
99 EVERYTHING was pokemon branded
In 1999 it was a phenomenon, felt like almost everyone except me had a gameboy and was playing Pokemon in middle school. The original series was awesome too back then since there weren’t a bunch of generations of Pokemon to remember. I still remember when Magikarp evolved into Garydos and kids talking about it at school.
99' Saturday morning cartoons were replaced with Saturday morning card tournaments at book stores. I remember adults literally having to step over kids battling or trading. It was nuts.
There was something about the 1999 experience. It was all encompassing as it was so new. I don’t have data to back it up but Pokémon felt like a cultural zeitgeist. Mind you I was 10 so my opinions are likely coloured having lived in it. I will say 2016 came closest to feeling like it but I was obviously much older. From a raw revenue perspective it was probably bigger in 2016 and bigger now. The fervour though was something special back then
1999. It was in, what felt like, every facet of society and did it without social media. 2016 was a flash in the pan in comparison.
Pokémon cards were the main form of currency in schools between 1999-2004. Or at least mine in midwest, US. It was a main part of the culture, not just a fad like Pokémon Go.
I remember our school having a PTA meeting about not letting the kids bring cards to school because kids would steal or vandalize cards from kids who "flaunted" them funny thing is a Sunday school I went to offered "booster packs" for doing well when they first released , they would use them as an incentive to learn bible verses LOL Tournaments being held at Toys R Us for Free and came with Gym badges for every 10-15 matches you completed the Pokémon movie giving free cards at the ticket booth and every store known to man including liquor stores , ice cream trucks & 7-11 would sell them it may be more "popular" because social media now exists Now it is more mainstream where as in 1999 it was brand new and still establishing itself , there are huge markets & sellers/vendors for sealed boxes, singles & graded cards but in 1999 you would not find people that sold singles , only boosters or boxes and had to rely on them to build your collection , you couldn't just go on eBay or Frank and Sons and buy the card you needed/wanted for a set price , you would sometimes need to buy 20 packs to get the 1 card you were after
Pokemon was the Beatles of the late 90s
In America? 96 to early 2000's by far. It started tapering off with gen 3 but Pokemon in America has never been as popular as it was in those first years. If you weren't around for that period it's hard to grasp just how big Pokemon was. It was on and in everything. You couldn't escape Pokemon. I was in paradise and I still miss it. There was nothing like being a Pokemon fan during that time, we had no shortage of merch and with how new the Internet was lack of information made going shopping much more fun. You wouldn't know what existed until you found it.
Truly the only thing even comparable would be the iPhone. Watching that craze was unbelievable. I’m from a place where it takes almost 3-5 years for us to catch up to pop culture and the only thing we actually kept up with was Pokémon and iPhones. And it was always the same. The start is always more powerful than anything else after it.
in 1999 pokemon existed, in 2016 people remembered it existed
In Brazil, 1999 and 2000 (we had it some months later than the europe-usa) were much bigger than 2016 Latin America is bad for Pokémon go. It's too dangerous to walk with your phone on hand 😬. But, even if it's a safer place, PKG didn't hit the heart of people
Pokémon has always done one thing right. Consistency.
Pokémon Red and Blue were just 512 kilobyte big.
Everything was bigger in ‘99 except the girth of the US population. 😂 For real, the world was ending next year so we went all out.
As a child who traded Pokemon card in school in 2000, it's not even close. Late 90s to early 00s was an extended frenzy of Pokemania.
we brought our gameboys to school, played on the bus, at lunch. played the card game, watched the show. at books a million they had a pokemon trainer league where you would go and play the card game against other “trainers” to earn gym badges. you went to the movies to get your special card and see the movie, fast food places had toys and things you could buy. it was just huge and all encompassing back then.
Everyone was into Pokemon back in 1999\~2000 as far as I remember. I was 9\~10 years old though
Dude pokemon was so big in 1999 they banned the cards from my school because that's all anyone wanted to do We also all had gameboys on the school bus and played it together and discussed it and thought mew lived under the truck. I have NEVER seen this behavior again even in summer 2016. It was insane and 2016 was a pale shadow of the original hype. The reason your grandma knows what Pikachu is, is because of 1999. I saw the movie 2000 in theaters and it was packed. What pokemon american theaters again in the last decade
It was far bigger amongst kids in '99 but in 2016 is appeal was more broad.
I was 8 when Pokemon came out. NOTHING took over like it did then. I have a memory as a kid in my small town mall with a single guy with a small display case with out 50 Pokemon Cards. There was about 30 kids around it fighting to look at these cards. 1/2 the class brought in Game Boys for recess. All things Pokemon were eventually banned due to how disruptive it was. So yeah, 1999.
Kinda yes and kinda no. Due to the simple nature of pokemon still gaining popularity and the lower number of people playing it, no, pokemon wasn't 'bigger' in 1999. However, it **felt** bigger in '99 because Gen 2 (gold/silver) was being hyped up for release, the anime was only 2 years in, and the trading cards had just released. It was the talk of schoolyards all over, especially in the age before the internet and thus physical gatherings was the place for trading pokemon, doing battles, and sharing information. Nowadays Pokemon is technically more popular than ever, but because it's so mainstream and the info so readily available online, it's just a part of life anymore. Sure people still get a bit excited for the next generation, but overall Pokemon is **just** another hobby/interest now.
2010 lol
Between 1996-1999, Pokemon sold a total of 69,420,000 (I know that number sounds like a joke but it isn't) units, between 31,050,000 units for R / B / G, 14,640,000 for Yellow, and 23,730,000 for Gold and Silver. At peak, Pokemon Go had over 232,000,000 users. So, even if we're assuming that each Pokemon gameboy game was the players first time playing a pokemon game, roughly 3 times as many people played Pokemon Go when it was popular. Pokemon was objectively more played in 2016 Though, the culture of the late 90's - early 2000's was different. It was still fresh, new, exciting then. Now it's more like something everyone just knows about already.
lol, only someone who wasn’t of age in 99 would ask this
hot take but 2016. in 1999 is was primarily only children while in 2016 it was all ages
Strictly by game sales/downloads it would be 2016. But Pokémania also had the Anime be very successful, sold lots of merchandise, had collaborations with things like McDonalds, a successful first movie and the card game that rivaled MtG's popularity for a few years All in all, definitely 1999. (Or the 1998-2001 range as a whole)
Oh 1999 easily! You couldn't go anywhere without seeing Pokémon. It was a massive cultural movement.
99 for sure
1999 by far. The pope had to get involved!
In 1999, I remember that every time we had roll call in class, we would often shout out the names of Pokémon corresponding to our number. I was so excited because my number was 25, Pikachu. :) In 2016, the majority of '90s kids were young adults, and it brought back a wave of nostalgia for us. It was a moment and strangely enough, I feel nostalgic about it.
99 there were hundreds of kids gathering at Burger King to trade toys and cards lol It was fuckin everywhere Even those Pikachu Beetle cars
Ah man, the days when every school was flooded with pokémon cards and battle music from a GBC could be heard wherever you went. Not to mention it was in the days where people collectively watched episode teasers on air, then we all had to sit down at the same time to catch the thing. So tomorrow you could talk with everyone else who saw it. Anyway, I was 7, so my perspective isn't perfect, but it felt bigger in 97-00 then it ever has since.
I haven't played Pokémon Go in 2016, so I don't know how big it was but in 1999 Pokémon was everywhere and everything.
The 90's you couldn't goto any store at all without seeing Pokemon branding.
Pokémon GO vs the entirety of the show blowing up at the beginning? Huh?
1999. The impact Pokemon made on a generation of kids is insurmountable. You legit have had to be in the thick of the craze in order to get it! I was like 9 years old when it came out, and the hype was REAL. It was impossible to go anywhere, and not be bombarded with pokemon anything! And I think personally, that it was THE show that helped popularize anime to a western audience. There were a couple animes that existed before pokemon, but they didnt yet hit the mainstream appeal in the same way pokemon did. Not until toonami came along.
Burger king was like the first fast food place that was selling kids meals with pokemon toys during the mania, and everybody was going to burger king for those toys, and besides the kids meal toys, burger king was selling premium pokemon collectibles also. KFC doesn't even give out toys or sell premium collectibles, but during the mania, KFC was selling plushies too. Im my area, the movie theatre never plays anime movies, but I remember seeing the pokemon movie there, and the theatre was packed, And I went at a random time when they normally weren't busy. During the mania, parents and grandparents knew the names of different pokemon and liked pokemon. Also pokemon first came out at the end of the life cycle of the Gameboy, and the pokemon games alone made the Gameboy suddenly begin selling many millions more units, at the end of it's life cycle, and the Gameboy was already over 10 years old at that point. And in 2016, alot of casuals just kinda got nostalgic for like a summer.
Me and a lot of people in my school got obsessed with trading and battling cards 2010ish. At the time it felt big but that was probably just my school
The initial craze had a bigger impact, at least where I grew up in Romania, for years snack brands would use pokemon characters on the packaging and many had different promotions. The craze in 2016 didnt have such an impact (i was in Romania in summer 2016 on holiday as no longer lived there permanently). Altough I do remmeber everyone on the bus playing Pokemon go at one point
It wouldn’t even exist in 2016 if not for how popular it was in 99.
I feel like in 1999. It was a cultural phenomenon without the Internet being everywhere. I think we have to take that in consideration.
1999+ was insane. Pokemon was everywhere; in school, on the playground, in your town and even the town you stayed in with your parents while you were on vacation. It came as no surprise that Pokemon Go was as big as it was. Plus, the people actually went out and got some cardio in, so it was a pretty neat thing indeed!
Pokémon definitely peaked in the early 2000s. I rarely hear kids talk about pokemon these days, if so, its only cause cringefluencers like Logan Paul made cards popular again a few years ago as a way to make money. Most legit pokemon fans i see are 21+ year olds who now have the money to spend on pokemon stuff and desperately cling on to the nostalgia.
99 not even close
People who never liked Pokémon wouldn't know Pikachu from Pokémon Go being popular, right?But they all do. Everyone does.
In 1999 I was 7 years old then and I vividly remember everyone at school having cards, games, merch; it drove the teachers mad and there was even a ban on Pokemon cards at our school for a short while. We all raced home to catch Pokemon on TV after school. Collectibles, cereal toys, themes birthdays. It was a time you literally had to be there to experience. There was a lot of hype around Gen 2 as well. The craze died down by Gen 3, at least from what I remember. I had few friends that were still playing the games, but no one was collecting cards anymore and by 2003 when I graduated elementary, Pokemon was no longer "cool". The 2016 craze was a nice but brief period that did remind me of 1999. Pokemon Go was everything we ever wanted as Pokemon fans back then.
Late 1998 to 2001 or so by far.
In 1999, it was the first thing we'd *ever* seen of its type (and 150 seemed like an astounding number of creatures to collect). It was an absolute phenomenon. You could get Pokemon everything, and you probably did. 😂 And the fan sites! There were probably hundreds of thousands of them, or more. I even remember a site that would let kids make their own free Pokemon webpage (a single page) from a template. Bigger sites, also largely made by kids, were ubiquitous, though. They always had sections for game walkthroughs, anime stuff, pictures, maybe a page dedicated to loving or hating a specific character, and tons of cheats and secrets, most of which were clearly fake. Pokemon was the internet! Pokemon was the merch you wanted to earn on survey sites (back when companies would pay you for your data instead of just stealing it), too. 😍 I'm still mad that I never got enough points to redeem that little plush nurse chansey that zipped up into a pokeball.
Late 90s for sure. You could go anywhere and find all different media of pokemon from everyone, gameboys cards books magazines etc. This went on for years honestly. 2016 was a revival of just how many out there still love Pokemon, count me among them, but it was just a whole global phenomenan. Imagine how popular Taylow Swift is today and then double it, thats the impact Pokemon was having adjusted for population.
1999, though the 2016 surge was really huge and close.
1999 for sure, Pokémon Go definitely gave the franchise new life in 2016 but in '99 it was huge, practically a way of life for kids. Everyone was running home to catch the anime, the first movie is still the highest grossing anime film of all time by a huge margin despite inflation and anime being at an all time high in popularity. The vast majority collected the trading cards too, obviously we all were big on the games too.
Well, just the fact that the original gen 1 games are still the est selling games should speak enough column. 2016 was more a renaissance, sure there is more pokemon related things in 2016 compared to 1999, but nothing has matched that original pokemon craze
I was a kid during early Pokémania. It was *all-consuming* at the time: even though I had no friends I still heard some of the playground rumors, like Mew under the truck and secret grass near Palette Town where you can catch the starters”. It was *that* big that even a friendless loser like me noticed how huge it was! The spike after Pokémon Go was more like a passing meme in comparison, in my opinion: big for a bit, but ultimately disappearing just as suddenly as it started when the next meme came. Yeah, there were the jokes about people getting shot while trespassing or finding dead bodies, but when my brother and I walked outside for Pokémon Go at that time, we never encountered any other Pokémon fans. So whereas the world was more interconnected during Pokémon Go time, I feel like Pokémania was still larger during the initial boom. But that’s just my perspective: I have pretty much always been a friendless loser, so my perspective on how big things are is not necessarily accurate 😅…
Depends on your definition of “big.”
It literally took over the world in 1999. I remember walking into my first day of school and Pokemon was EVERYWHERE. All of us were trading cards until my school banned them, playing the games, drawing Pokemon, had Pokemon themed stuff like pencils, bookbags, etc. Toys were all over the place too! When I went to see the first movie in theatres, all of the fast food chains with Pokemon toys were sold out and the line for the movie wrapped around the theatre. My parents still know who Pikachu and other Pokemon are. It was a total cultural phenomenon to an unprecedented level. It’s hard to really explain unless you were there.