Pokémon’s 30th Anniversary: A Nostalgia-Fueled Frenzy That Leaves Us Wanting More Than Just Merch

It’s been nearly impossible to escape Pokémon for the past few weeks. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original games, the Pokémon Company has unleashed an unprecedented promotional nostalgia tsunami across the entire month: from celebrity campaigns where stars gushed about their favorite pocket monsters (featuring the unforgettable sight of Lady Gaga harmonizing with Jigglypuff) to the re-release of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen on Nintendo Switch—excellent Game Boy Advance remakes of the 1996 classics. The Natural History Museum in London opened a special Pokémon pop-up shop, and a limited-edition greyscale Pikachu plush toy sold out in approximately three seconds (with more on the way, much to scalpers’ disappointment everywhere).

And that’s just the beginning. We’ve witnessed the opening of a Pokémon theme park in Tokyo, the announcement of a tiny Game Boy-shaped music player that plays the games’ soundtrack, a collaboration with high-fashion brand JimmyPaul that featured its own runway show… it’s been relentless. Regular readers know I’m exactly the target audience for this Pokémon nostalgia festival: one of the first generation of Pokémon kids now hurtling toward 40. And yet I’ve remained largely unmoved by most of it, even slightly annoyed.

This is because, fundamentally, most of these Pokémon celebrations are just stuff. Expensive stuff, at that. I look at this £579.99 Lego set featuring Charizard, Venusaur, and Blastoise and think: in this economy? I’m painfully aware I’m entering the Peak Nostalgia period of my life, where every company will try to sell me things based on my childhood favorites to buy with my (theoretically) disposable income. My Gen X friends all got suckered into giant Star Wars Lego sets, just as I’m now being invited to blow my family’s weekly food budget on an upmarket Pikachu hoodie.

Nobody is immune to this nostalgia bait, least of all me; there are several gloriously unnecessary pieces of video game merchandise in my house, including a Bulbasaur-themed blazer that I’ve been wearing on my book tour. But I do at least want to put up a pretense of resistance to this relentless, ever-expanding commodification. The advert for that Pokémon Lego features a bored, tired-looking elder millennial guy in a grey suit glumly rifling through bills and invoices before donning a trainer’s cap and an expression of wonder and joining his friends outside. “Your time has come! And destiny doesn’t care about lower back pain!” the ad says. AAAARGH! It’s so humiliatingly transparent! I feel both patronized and called out. Pokémon Go away.

You could argue that “stuff” has been an essential component of Pokémania since the turn of the millennium: the cards, the toys, the clothing, all of that came along with the TV show and the games when they were in their first wave of popularity, and Pokémon Center shops have been feeding a voracious appetite for merch ever since. The games themselves are about acquisition, after all: gotta catch ’em all!

However, this has never been how I’ve seen Pokémon. For me it was never so much a game about collecting every Pokémon as about forming attachments to the very particular creatures that you made part of your team. Pokémon is a series that connects people. The experience of playing Pokémon is what I remember from my childhood, not the tat. It made me feel free, and empowered, a child in charge of my own destiny.

Which is why, at the end of this materialist month of Pokémon celebrations, I was delighted when they actually announced some new games. Pokémon Winds and Waves are set in an Indonesia-inspired new region: the trailer evokes fresh air, sea breeze, and a holiday-world full of Pokémon and possibility. Creatures roam in open plains and swim peacefully underwater. I saved it to watch with my Pokémon-obsessed son after school, and he squeaked with delight at the appearance of three new starter Pokémon, one of which is basically just a puppy. (There’s also a serious-looking bird and a yassified water gecko.) I looked at him afterwards and thought: ahh, there’s that sense of wonder.

Winds and Waves aren’t coming out until 2027. A five-year gap between mainline Pokémon games is unprecedented—but given that the last two games, Scarlet and Violet, launched in a bit of a state, it’s clear that the developers at Game Freak needed more time to make the next ones special. Perhaps all the endless merch is freeing those creators to spend that extra time, rather than getting new Pokémon entries out every year or two to maximize profits. If that’s the case, I can look upon the avalanche of Pokémon stuff slightly more kindly. My children and I will, I hope, still have something brilliant to play.

What to Play

If 2027 seems like a long time away, give Pokémon Pokopia a go. This is a spin-off collaboration between Game Freak and Koei Tecmo, a gently laborious game in which you restore a barren wasteland to beauty, taking the form of an anthropomorphic transforming Ditto. I’ve been really surprised by how much I like this, and how easily I have been drawn into watering grass, building little houses for Bulbasaurs, and hunting down Pokémon after creating their extremely specific habitats.

Think Animal Crossing meets Viva Piñata meets Dragon Quest Builders (with which Pokopia shares a developer). It’s also a novel expression of Pokémon’s latent environmentalism.

Available on: Nintendo Switch 2
Estimated playtime: 30-plus hours

What to Read

• Another Nintendo classic celebrated a big birthday recently: The Legend of Zelda turned 40. For the AV Club, Marc Normandin writes about how that first NES game brought elements of the rather impenetrable 1980s computer role-playing scene to the masses. It gives great context to Zelda’s early history.

• In less positive news, yesterday Wildlight Entertainment announced that its quirky live-service hero shooter Highguard will permanently shut down next week… just two months after releasing to admittedly mixed reviews. Keith wrote about the game’s odd surprise launch in this newsletter in January.

• Bloomberg reports that before Sony shuttered the acclaimed remake-focused studio Bluepoint last month, it had pitched a remake of the PlayStation 4 classic Bloodborne—but the idea was rejected by the game’s original director, Hidetaka Miyazaki. The report also has some juicy insider details about the God of War spin-off that Bluepoint was working on for the past few years.

Question Block

A question this week from regular reader Iain:

“I have been playing video games since the early 80s (I am nearly 80 myself). I have a collection of what I would consider the best in each type of game. With very few exceptions I don’t see the point of investing in new titles when I can just go back and play Mass Effect, Dark Souls, Skyrim etc. Am I depriving myself of new gaming experiences?”

When you are a connoisseur of anything, you become very demanding; your quality bar is high. And the desire for novelty sometimes doesn’t outweigh that desire for quality. It’s like picking restaurants: do you go with the place you know you like, or do you go somewhere unproven? The investment of time, energy, and money sometimes doesn’t feel worth it when there’s the potential for disappointment.

But then, as with a restaurant, that new game you try might become a favorite. Propelled by an insatiable desire for novelty (and professional necessity), I barrel through probably 50 games every year, because a few of those will be things I’ll tell other people about for years. But just as a lot of people get a bit stuck in the music of their youth, they can get stuck in familiar games as well.

A friend of mine calls these “home” games—something like a Destiny, a Dark Souls, or a Skyrim, a game that feels safe and that takes up most of your time. So perhaps look at new(er) games as excursions, day trips, or holidays. Devote a few hours or days to them. Afterwards, you can always return home. A wonderful thing about video games is that people are always doing new things with them; there is never any shortage of appealing destinations.

If you’ve got a question for Question Block—or anything else to say about the newsletter—hit reply or email us on [email protected].

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