TIME Pokémon

A POKÉMON GAME COMES WITH a few guarantees. You begin as a young trainer, leaving home to meet with a local authority figure, ranging from a professor to a school administrator. That figure gives you a choice of three “starter” Pokémon, each one representing a different elemental typing–always fire, water, and grass. You’re given a handful of Poké Balls, the in-game apparatus used for catching the mythical beasts, in addition to a Pokédex, a portable device for tracking your progress in the game’s central theme: catching them all. Insidious villains will surely get in your way, and in order to complete the game, you need to beat a set number of Gym Leaders, each with their own special typing. Over the years, iterations of the core games have added new…

IT WAS A PARTICULARLY HOT day in Topeka, Kansas, on Aug. 27, 1998. Temperatures reached a sweltering 97 degrees, making it one of the most scorching days that month. For the 2,500 lucky kids gathered in the city, it was about to start raining–raining Pikachu, that is. That afternoon, 700 stuffed Pikachu were dropped from the air, along with 10 skydivers who landed and then raced away in yellow Pikachu-themed Volkswagen New Beetles, each painted yellow, with two pointy ears fixed to the roof and a lightning-bolt tail on the back. The Poké-themed bonanza was a month before the Pokémon anime’s North American debut and celebrated the arrival of the games (which were already wildly popular in Japan) in the U.S. “Pokémon ‘Pretty Neat,’” read the front page of the…

AFTER FIRST COMING UP WITH the idea for Pokémon in 1990, Satoshi Tajiri labored for nearly six years over the original game. A person who usually shuns the limelight, Tajiri talked about his labor of love with TIME Tokyo bureau chief Tim Larimer and intern Takashi Yokota at the offices of his small company, Game Freak, in the city’s Setagaya neighborhood, a youth-culture hub with several colleges and universities. His company occupies two floors in a non-descript office building. Sandwiched between the Game Freak floors is a “cram school” for junior high school students who are taking extra paid-for lessons in hopes of improving their next entrance exam scores. Tajiri had just finished work on the new series of Pokémon games for Nintendo’s Game Boy, to be released in Japan…

MONSTERS MAKE FOR DISQUIeting playmates. No matter how toylike and frivolous they may appear, they are unnatural and, in the end, deal in unresolved fear. But monsters also have a way with children. Consider the suspicious charms of the Pokémon creatures: Gengar, Cubone, and Chansey, for example. The first is a ghostly purple ball with a devilishly cute smile, horns to match, and a crocodile spine. The second is a sort of bear cub with a skull over its head—or is the whole thing its actual head? The third is a vaguely dinosauric, pinkish cloud. Their equally bizarre compatriots range in height from a foot (that would be a Pidgey) to 28 feet (that’s an Onix) and in weight from 2 pounds (Diglett) to 1,914 pounds (Snorlax). Their fighting skills…

IF A BEWILDERED CONSUMER turned to an online dictionary before 2016, hoping to make some sense out of all this Pokémon business that had dominated news cycles for decades, they likely would have been greeted with a correction. Did you mean pikeman, a soldier armed with a pike? Or perhaps putamen, the shell membrane? After Pokémon GO drove headlines, however, a new set of results promised clarity on Dictionary.com. The editors said that the timing was a coincidence. This trademark just happened to be in their definition queue right as a viral mobile game by that name took the world by poké-storm. But it was dovetailing with a “surge in lookups” that they were seeing and is timely evidence that this Japanese-spawned term has become an English word in its own…

1996 THE ORIGINALS Pocket Monsters Red and Green, the first-ever Pokémon games and primary games of Generation I, released in Japan for the Game Boy; Pocket Monsters Blue released in Japan; Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) released 1997 THE ANIME Pokémon Adventures manga released in Japan; Pocket Monsters: Original Series, the first Japanese anime series, first aired in Japan with the release of the first episode of the first season, Pokémon, I Choose You! 1998 COMING TO AMERICA First-ever Pokémon Center, Pokémon Center Tokyo, opened in Tokyo; Pokémon The First Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back released in Japan; first English-dub anime season, Pokémon: Indigo League, released in North America; Pokémon Red and Blue released in North America; Hey You, Pikachu!, a spinoff game, released in Japan for Nintendo 64 1999 GOLD…