I loved gen 1 pokemon as a kid in the 90s. But today I sometimes feel like our culture is locked in time. Walking into a toy store is somewhat depressing - everything looks exactly the same as it did when I was a kid! It’s been 30+ years, kids should have way cooler toys and IPs.
Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit
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Re: Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit
#52It's just a fad
There's Godwins law about comparing everything to nazis. Will there be someperson's law of completely misunderstanding what a word means?
You might be interested in Poe's Law [0]
Re: Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit
#53Last weekend I vibe-coded a website where my boys (5 and 8 years old) can look up their Pokémon cards to find out what they mean. They can read Dutch but they have cards with English & Portugese texts. Site helps them learning English :-) https://kartiq.xyz/en
From your /en route, clicking on a card brings me to the /nl/cards route.
Re: Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit
#54I 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 th…
should check out the Legacy line of romhacks, ie Crystal Legacy, Emerald Legacy. if youre ever in the mood for vanilla+. very very high quality releases made with intention and care for the base games.
For absolutely crazy releases, Pokemon Unbound is an absolutely next level romhack
Re: Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit
#55Love Pokemon, hate the whole unregulated illegal gambling part of it and how they pray on kids. It’s the dark side of Nintendo. And of course the stories like this https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_pacific/2025-08-13/mcd... Honestly TCGs like Pokemon, YuGiOh, and Magic should have been regulated long long time ago but we have 100 years of history with baseball cards too so nothing going to happen.
Their extended popularity should be viewed closer to praying on addiction than an accomplishment of culture. The phone game, by removing the exploration of outside aspect, became just mindless collecting. If you have ever been to an event as an outside spectator, there is as much anxiety in their air as joy. Pack opening is the equivalent of pulltabs or scratch offs. It's an asset class closer to beanie babies than b…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_card
Addiction has always been a component here.
Re: Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit
#56I loved gen 1 pokemon as a kid in the 90s. But today I sometimes feel like our culture is locked in time. Walking into a toy store is somewhat depressing - everything looks exactly the same as it did when I was a kid! It’s been 30+ years, kids should have way cooler toys and IPs.
> But today I sometimes feel like our culture is locked in time.
People say this often and I agree that it does feel that way.
They particularly underline "they are constantly remaking old movies!" which is also true.
However, this is not a new phenomenon. As someone who loves movie trivia, IMDB is full of "this 1980s film was actually a remake of this other 1947 film". An older example: the Victorians (~1837 - ~1901) were obsessed with the ancient Romans. This was during a time when the telegraph was connecting the world and people could talk to humans, instantly, on the other side of the world.
Re: Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit
#57Rant incoming... My wife and I live near a park. When we go on walks, we see people who have driven to the park, where they drive slowly around the parking lot, frequently stopping and starting, cars running the whole time. Rarely do they get out of their car. They are, I believe, playing Pokemon Go. Yesterday there were over 2 dozen cars driving around. Nobody was walking. They don't talk to anybody. They are like z…
Maybe complain to the council and ask them to remove the pokestop if people keep doing this.
Re: Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit
#58I loved gen 1 pokemon as a kid in the 90s. But today I sometimes feel like our culture is locked in time. Walking into a toy store is somewhat depressing - everything looks exactly the same as it did when I was a kid! It’s been 30+ years, kids should have way cooler toys and IPs.
I was just thinking too when there are new IPs, they are completely indistinct today. Take a character from any of the past 15 years of animated movies and they are interchangeable with each other. Everyone is afraid to establish a design language beyond looking kinda-sorta like a pixar character.
90s were so different with creative freedom with the media we were exposed to. All those shows had their own art style. Characters were distinct and unmistakable. Brands were cemented as a result.
Marketing executives have lost the hat. They are like those people from the Neutral Planet in Futurama. Somehow they reigned in everything that made them successful in the 80s and 90s.
Re: Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit
#59Here's a little story I read about how Pokemon's story intertwined with the rest of the fantasy gaming universe:
You might have heard of another fantasy card game called Magic: The Gathering, started in the early 1990s by a small company called Wizards of the Coast which Wikipedia says was named after something in the founders' personal RPG world. MTG took off and WOTC did very well.
In April 1997, apparently with cash to burn, WOTC invested in a bit of nostalgia, acquiring a dying gaming company called TSR which made a game called Dungeons & Dragons. D&D had peaked in the early 1980s and was then steadily run into the ground by two owners. WOTC's investment didn't do much for over a decade, iirc (becoming so desperate that Hasbro (see below) management embraced an employee's idea for 'open source gaming').
The same year WOTC continued their speculative investments, acquiring the US (or English language?) license to a Japanese fantasy card game called Pokemon. This one was a hit.
Two years later Hasbro acquired WOTC. The story said that Hasbro wanted the Pokemon license and maybe MTG. The rest of the assets were an afterthought.
The joke was on Hasbro because Nintendo canceled the Pokemon license in 2003, leaving Hasbro with MTG and that nostalgic afterthought, D&D. I wonder how Hasbro could acquire WOTC without some assurance about the Pokemon license. But D&D, in a business and cultural sense, of course became an amazing and I think very rare comeback story. (The story was from a few years ago; I don't know how D&D is doing right now.)
Re: Thirty years on, Pokémon is still a monster hit
#60I loved gen 1 pokemon as a kid in the 90s. But today I sometimes feel like our culture is locked in time. Walking into a toy store is somewhat depressing - everything looks exactly the same as it did when I was a kid! It’s been 30+ years, kids should have way cooler toys and IPs.
I walk past something resembling a claw machine arcade on my commute, and I've noticed that although every month the prizes in the window swap around, the anime woman figurine and the mascot plush always looks quite similar to the one from the last month.
I _think_ they're from different series, but aesthetically it's impossible for me to figure out one from the other. Trends are still changing, but I think our design sensibilities have definitely found a place to plateau.