Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit

I still do a double-take when I see Pokémon trading card game vending machines at the grocery store.

I am an elder Millennial with no kids…I knew it was still a popular game, but seeing a great big Pokéball machine next to the shopping carts really drove it home.

my wife and i were just musing to ourselves this morning about whether it was strange that the franchise hasn't died yet.

that conversation went somewhere along the lines of: "surely kids aren't interested in what their parents were/are interested in" (oh didn't we hate our parents' style) -- and then I remembered that I really wanted to see Speed Racer, which was what my dad was into in the late sixties. i still thought that the animation was about as impressive as pokemon at the time (funny how they animated more frames than one punch man these days!!!)

i think kids these days complain that their fat old parents are wearing (ostensibly 'millennial') graphic tees in public so there is plenty of generational rejection. but it's really weird how the internet hasn't developed more obvious generational 'coding' (except in language), and hasn't rejected things like pokemon entirely.

or is it pretty easy to code us? lol

their rejection of us aside (which is an evolutionary and biological thing) i wonder if our parents felt 'as connected' to us generationally speaking as we 'feel' we are to the next (socioeconomically and socio-digitally)?

Few franchises that span generations?

The entire current zeitgeist of popular media is about zombifying your parent's IP. It's Nintendo's entire business in fact. Sure, usually they are doing good work with that IP, but they are the outlier in the industry. Everyone else is shitting out remakes of what your daddy played that don't even understand the original material, or like Halo, remakes of what your daddy played which was already a mediocre remake.

Halo 1 came out the month after 9/11. It's old enough to have graduated college and started a family. It will be resold soon.

Jurassic Park was dug up out of the grave to crap out several more movies. Star Wars is inflating a couple good plot lines into an entire Universe of "Content". Even reality shows are made up of people who were contestants on older reality shows. Pixar is making yet another Toy Story.

Aliens is still going, long after it's reanimated corpse was overplayed.

One of the premier television series, that just finished, was all about nostalgia for living in the 80s, with some silly plot tacked on that apparently even the writers didn't care about.

Even our propaganda, like Top Gun, is basically the same script as an 80s movie with minimal changes.

It feels like the entire media ecosystem is designed around reselling content to my parent's generation before they finally kick the bucket or satisfying the nostalgia of that generation's early children. Even the President's administration bitches about things like the 90s USDA food pyramid that only affected that 13ish year segment of the population and was deprecated, twice, since then. Our authoritarianism is nostalgia based, for the time that generation was children, and things were "Simple" and "Good", because they were children and got to live the lives of kids.

I grew up playing the games, and still have my copy of Yellow and Red. I fell of the wagon somewhere around Gen VI, the games just got to easy. It became clear to me that Gamefreak was just throwing in the towel and gave up making interesting games.

That being said, recently I started getting into the world of Romhacks and they have sparked new joy in me. The games are hard, fun, and have a lot of love poured into them. I'm going through Radical Red right now, and its been an incredible time.

i play both! there is a sort of comfort in pokemon, like watching your favorite movie or eating junkfood, but i also love me a gourmet meal too. room for both! who doesnt wanna play a game with their favorite little doods, getting see what others can become favorites and then ya know everyone else playing so its a fun community thing. i also do love the grinding especially in the older games, and the RNG is fun to me. love when that 1% encounter rate hits after 30 mins of searching.