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The world in which he grew up bore little resemblance to that of his grandparents’ generation. Tajiri was born in 1965, 20 years after Japan lost World War Two. So too the heroes, who in being schoolchildren stood in stark contrast to the usual macho men or femme fatales of action-adventure games. The rounded, huggable-looking Pocket Monsters looked more like relatives of Hello Kitty than the ferocious goblins of the average fantasy-quest. Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario and an adviser to Tajiri during his efforts, explained in an interview that he was told “that this kind of thing would never appeal to American audiences.” The problem, as Nintendo’s brass saw it, was that the whole thing was too kawaii – too cute.
At first, there doesn’t even seem to have been much of a push to export it. It was so different, in fact, that nobody at Nintendo quite knew what to make of the game. Part of the game was devoted to battle, but an equal or even larger part focused on collecting the imaginary beasties into a virtual menagerie. Set in a fictional countryside populated by wild monsters, Pokémon Red Version and Blue Version compelled players to explore the fields, rivers, and forests of a fantasy world in search of monsters – not to kill but to tame and train. This was a different sort of play, by turns explorative and meditative, with little of the violence associated with so many digital fantasies. The first Pokémon games were a quantum leap beyond those simple arcade-gaming experiences. In the seminal Pong, created by US company Atari in 1972, two players squared off in a virtual ballgame played out between glowing paddles of light. But the development of the game stretched out for some six years – a veritable eternity in the game industry, and by which time the Game Boy felt downright antiquated in comparison to the increasingly high-tech machines of rival companies.Ĭompetitive gaming has been with us since the dawn of video games.
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Satoshi Tajiri was just 24 when he came up with the concept in 1990, a year after Nintendo’s then-groundbreaking portable Game Boy system went on sale. But it was actually the brainchild of a young man who had spent an adolescence immersed in video games. What was it about this menagerie of pocket-sized monsters that so bewitched children around the globe? To many Western and Japanese observers, Pokémon seemed to have materialised out of thin air. The ingeniously engineered Nintendo Entertainment System, invented that same year in Japan, arrived on Western shores two years later in 1985. The spectacular success story was due to a confluence of factors chief among them was the implosion of the once-dominant US home-gaming industry in a 1983 crash. – Japan's unexpected relationship with reggaeīy the early ’90s, Nintendo was making more money than all of Hollywood’s top five studios put together, with more children surveyed recognising Mario than Mickey Mouse.
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– The anime series that saved me from burnout
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When Pokémon: The First Movie debuted in US theatres on a weekday in 1999, so many children played truant from school to see it that the New York Times dubbed it the “ Pokeflu.” And its global reach was such that anthropologists studying the supposedly “Stone Age” Dani tribe of Indonesia’s remote Irian Jaya reported encountering children running around the village dressed in Pokémon outfits. The craze wasn’t limited to the video game the Pokémon brand proved so popular that in the United Kingdom many schools banned students from trading Pokémon cards. At the end of 1999 Nintendo announced the game had earned some $5bn (£4bn) – which at the time was the size of the entire US video game industry. Just one year later, 55,000 eager boys and girls besieged a Minneapolis shopping centre chosen as the start of a Nintendo-funded Pokémon Summer Training Tour.
Although it was made in Japan, for a moment at the turn of the 21st Century, no corner of the world was immune from what came to be called “ Pokémania". Released in its home country in 1996, Pokémon debuted in the US in August 1998. The seeds of the phenomenon first blossomed decades earlier, in another viral boom, one spread through toy stores and televisions rather than microbes: the Pokémon fad of the late ’90s.Ī portmanteau of the original title – Pocket Monsters – Pokémon was not just a video game but also a collection of trading cards and an anime series. Covid-19 certainly accelerated this digitisation of socialisation, but it didn’t create it. Many find comfort and relief from boredom in the aether of social media, through streaming services like Netflix or by trading digital turnips with friends and strangers to outfit the imaginary islands of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Our virtual lives have taken on a new significance amid seemingly endless quarantines and requests for social distancing.