Pikachu's Global Adventure

Abstract

In the last years of the last millennium, a new consumer phenomenon developed in Japan and swept across the globe.Pokémon, which began life as a piece of software to be played on Nintendo's Game Boy (a hand-held gaming computer), quickly diversified into a comic book, a television show, a movie, trading cards, stickers, small toys, and ancillary products such as backpacks and T-shirts.Entering into production and licensing agreements with Japanese companies including GameFreak, Creatures, Inc., Shogakukan Comics, and TV Tokyo, and with companies abroad including their wholly owned subsidiary, Nintendo of America, Wizards of the Coast (now a division of Hasbro), 4Kids Entertainment and the Warner Brothers Network, Nintendo created a set of interrelated products that dominated children's consumption from approximately 1996 to 2000.Pokémon is the most successful computer game ever made, the top globally selling trading card game of all time, one of the most successful children's television programs ever broadcast, the top grossing movie ever released in Japan, and among the five top earners in the history of films worldwide.At Pokémon's height of popularity, Nintendo executives were optimistic that they had a product, like Barbie and Lego, that would sell forever, and that, like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, would become enduring icons worldwide.But by the end of 2000, Pokémon fever had subsided in Japan and the United States, even as the products were still being launched in such countries as Brazil, Italy, and Israel.As I write this article, Pokémon's control of shelfspace and consumer consciousness seems to be declining, most dramatically in Japan and the United States.As the Pokémon phenomenon winds down we are left with the task of analyzing its significance and understanding the dynamics of its rise and, just as interesting, its fall.To analyze these phenomena, I hosted a Pokémon conference in Honolulu, U.S.A., in November 2000.Presenters came from Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, Israel, France, the U.K.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 174 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.