A boy who collected beetles
Satoshi Tajiri spent his childhood in the countryside outside Tokyo hunting insects, keeping them in jars and swapping them with friends. By the time he was grown up, those fields had been built over, and the children he saw were indoors with handheld games.
His idea was to put the insects inside the machine: creatures you could carry in a pocket, and a cable between two handhelds so you could trade them. The games took six years and very nearly bankrupted the small studio making them. They arrived in 1996 as two versions, Red and Green, each deliberately missing creatures the other had, so nobody could fill a POKEDEX without finding a friend to trade with.
The mascot was nearly somebody else
PIKACHU was not the original choice. When the cartoon was being planned, the intended star was Clefairy, a round pink creature already popular in Japan. The team switched because they thought a yellow electric mouse would appeal to boys and girls equally, and because yellow stands out on a small screen.
The name is two Japanese sound effects stuck together: pika, the noise of a spark, and chu, the squeak of a mouse. The world's most famous cartoon rodent is called, roughly, sparkle-squeak.
Rock-paper-scissors with eighteen hands
Under the friendly artwork, every BATTLE runs on a table of strengths and weaknesses. Fire beats grass, grass beats water, water beats fire — and then it keeps going, through eighteen TYPEs and dozens of interactions. A CHARIZARD is terrifying right up until it meets a rock type, and a GENGAR cannot be touched by an ordinary attack at all.
For a lot of children this is the first real strategy system they ever learn. Choosing which of six creatures to send out against an unknown opponent, deciding when to EVOLVE one and when to wait, is thinking several moves ahead — with a cartoon animal on the front of it.
From 151 to more than a thousand
The first games had 151 creatures, a number a generation of children memorised in order and can still recite. There are now well over a thousand, and every few years a new batch arrives with a new region to explore.
Those regions are drawn from real places. KANTO, where the first games are set, shares its name and shape with the region of Japan around Tokyo; later games have been modelled on France, Hawaii, Spain and the United Kingdom, complete with the local architecture and a few affectionate national jokes. The creatures follow suit — a British-themed game gives you a Pokémon based on a teapot.
Bigger than Star Wars
Pokémon is the highest-grossing entertainment franchise ever created, ahead of Star Wars, Marvel and Harry Potter once the games, the television series, the films and above all the trading cards are counted together. Individual rare cards have sold for millions of pounds.
In 2016 Pokémon GO put the creatures onto real streets through a phone camera, and parks filled with people of all ages walking miles to CATCH things that were not there. Whatever else it has become, the original idea came through intact: go outside, find creatures, show your friends.