When Satoshi Tajiri first came up with the idea for Pokémon, he was fueled by two inspirations. The first was his childhood passion for collecting bugs. The second was the Nintendo Gameboy’s Link Cable.
Satoshi imagined bugs crawling back and forth between the Link Cable, and children being able to collect, compete, and connect. Later on, legendary Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto came up with the idea to split the Pokémon up between two different versions of the game. If you owned Pokémon Red, you needed to trade someone with Pokémon Blue to collect all 150, and vice versa. As an added incentive, a Pokémon you received through a trade would level up faster in your game as well.
As a child, I logged a lot of hours in Pokémon Red, though I don’t remember trading much. I didn’t have a sibling or a Link Cable, and I didn’t bring my Gameboy to school or daycare.
In elementary school, I did collect and trade Pokémon cards, though. I wrote about my regrettable Chansey trade here. What was much more fun was just looking at friends’ card collections, shuffling through decks and binders, making sure precious cards were in sleeves, and so on. It was an occasion to talk about each others’ favorite cards, latest finds, and stores to buy from.
After I stopped collecting Pokémon cards, a friend and I started drawing our own. We folded a piece of letter size, A4 paper into eighths, ripped them up, which approximately was the size of a card. Then we started our designs. Our cards really had “Yes, and” improv comedy energy—the best official Pokémon card had 120 HP, while some of our custom creations had 1,000 HP—but we had a blast.
Pokémon was special because there were so many ways to participate, even if you weren’t a part of the video game or trading population. Before I got a Gameboy, I cherished my original Pokémon Official Handbook. I remember a man drawing a Charizard watercolor on cardstock for a church fundraiser, which my dad bought. That man, I realized, was an artist.
My mom similarly drew a Charizard picture for me when I was obsessed with the card. When my friend Larry was a kid, he even created an internet community for fans called Pokétown, which drew in hundreds of thousands of people. Communities like Bulbapedia, Pokémon Vortex, and many others have stood the test of time.
Satoshi’s original idea may have been for Pokémon to crawl between Link Cables. They’re everywhere now, and there are all sorts of ways to participate. Some business-related takeaways:
What made Pokémon so fun and worth collecting? The TV show and video games laid the foundation for the story and popularized it. Extending beyond those core products, the official toys were very well designed, and cards were beautifully illustrated. It’s a great example of how people have always cared about craft, and always will. While the bar is high in intellectual property like Pokémon, it’s much lower in most other fields. (Here are some interesting conversations about that.)
Merch is a great way to communicate these product extensions and offer a chance to collect. There are lots of software companies that express their brand through merch—Figma, Shopify, Salesforce, YC, amongst many others—that serve as examples of this.
As a businessperson, when you follow your enthusiasm, you create new ways to get lucky. Pay attention to your creative fevers. Worth its own post, but Stripe Press is one example of this. So is Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke’s obsession with Starcraft.
This level of engagement and connection is how a business retains its customers and advocates. And, perhaps, the most important and deep connections have their own funny ways of escaping quantiative metrics.