Pokémon cards were a massive reason why the monster-catching empire took off in the late 1990s. Yet, it can be argued that the Pokémon Trading Card Game has never been hotter than it is right now. The TCG was popular then, but they hadn't hit cultural saturation and perceived value to the point that a single card would sell for $16.5 million, like Logan Paul's Illustrator just did earlier this year.
There are plenty of ways to play the actual card game, too. Players can build decks with physical cards, though that is becoming a challenge as stores struggle to keep them in stock. There are the mobile apps, Pokémon Trading Card Game Live and Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, which are more accessible and convenient. For those who don't mind digging back into the archives, there's another option, maybe the best one, that's been there since almost the very start.
In November 1998, the cards hadn't been released in the US yet; the Base Set hit North American shelves that December. Before that, though, there was already word of a video game adaptation. While most Pokémon products enjoy simultaneous worldwide releases these days, new drops used to reach the US a year or more after they debuted in Japan. So, superfans who paid attention to what was going on with the Japanese side of the empire had access to early information. In this case, it was that Pokémon Card GB, as it was known in that territory, was on the way in December.
It took a year and change for the title, renamed simply to Pokémon Trading Card Game, to arrive stateside, dropping in April 2000. This timing wasn't perfect: Pokémon was still big, but the fad was showing signs of fading. In December 1999, over half of respondents to a USA Today poll said the craze wouldn't "last past the holidays." A few months later, a card shop employee said, "It died in, like, a month. It was huge for two years, and then it's, like, dead completely now." Even if the craze had died down at least a little, there was still an appetite for Pokémon. As toy expert Jim Silver put it in July 2000, "Is the craze dead? Yes. Are they still selling a lot of product? Yes."
The numbers seem to back this up: Pokémon Trading Card Game ended up selling about 3.7 million copies. That makes it one of the best-selling Game Boy games ever, but nowhere near the core Pokémon titles, or even the spin-off Pokémon Pinball, which moved over 5 million units. It didn't help that the Game Boy was late in its life at this point: When the game was released, Nintendo had already announced the Game Boy Advance a few months earlier. There was a lot of staleness at play and the stats indicate a lot of Pokémon fans missed out on this release.
Pokémon Trading Card Game, while a victim of circumstance as it may be, was still great.
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The Very Best: The Untold Story Of Pokémon, Satoshi Tajiri's Global Phenomenon
a book by Derrick Rossignol.
Learn more at pkmnbook.com.