Daniel Dockery - Monster Kids: How Pokémon Taught a Generation to Catch Them All

I was nine years old when I first saw Pokmonnot as video game creatures or anime characters, not even as manga page drawings or trading card art, but as a sticker. And thats all it took.

This fateful meeting occurred as I shopped in a Super Kmart in small-town North Carolina, a department store that, in fall 1998, already seemed on the verge of decrepitude. Its aisles were too close together, its stock seemed to have been so haphazardly placed on the shelves that it risked falling on you, and the whole thing smelled like the automotive section. The entire store rested in a fog of tire and seat cleaner aroma.

The video game area happened to be nestled next to the aisle with the motor oil and air fresheners, meaning that every trip to see the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation mandated plunging into the deep end. But on that day I was far too invested in my discovery to pay attention to the odor. Id snuck away from my parents to stare at the quiltlike array of titles. Not that Id be able to afford many of themmy family was firmly middle class and blue collar. It was nice to look, though, and to imagine the fantasies that lay behind labels like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Resident Evil .

At the far end of the aisle was the Game Boy section, where the handheld console and its wares reigned. These titles often went unnoticed by me at that age, as I figured that its selection of 8-bit adventures was simply a step down from those offered on the bigger (and more expensive) systems. That day, though, I lingered. In the bottom right corner of the glass, emblazoned on a sticker that almost seemed random in its placement, were the words: POKMON! GOTTA CATCH EM ALL! COMING FALL 1998.

Below this declaration were three monsters: a friendly yellow mouse with a tail shaped like a lightning bolt, a bipedal turtle with cannons extending from its shoulders, and a large wasp with drills on its forelimbs. Later, Id come to know them as Pikachu, Blastoise, and Beedrilljust three of the advertised 150 monsters available to capture and train in the first set of Pokmon gamesbut for now they remained nice rat, turtle man, and nightmare. Nonetheless, I was intrigued. I had to meet these things and, when I did, I had to catch them all.

I would receive Pokmon Red Version and a purple Game Boy Color on my birthday in the spring of the following year, after spending months cajoling my parents about its wonder and social benefits and evangelizing the animated series whenever it came on TV. It wasnt the first time I had played it (on a school field trip to the zoo, I borrowed my friends Game Boy and actively considered robbing him, such was my desire to keep playing Pokmon ) and as soon as I got the console in my hands, some form of Pokmon game would stay there for the next four or so years.

This book is about those four or so years.

Not about me. No one on earth deserves 70,000 words about me trying to sneak Pokmon Red into Scout camp multiple times. Or an entire chapter about how I brought my Game Boy to a middle school dance and during Outkasts Ms. Jackson, it fell out of my pocket, forcing me to scramble around on the floor for it, ruining the awkward gyration of at least four preteens.

Instead, this is about the four or so years that nearly everyone I know experienced, the years when Pokmon came to North America, and the media, along with various school groups, religious organizations, and countless parents, had no idea of how to handle it and its rampant popularity. Many people have referred to these years as Pokmania, a moniker that treats it less like a capable franchise that happened to be packaged in an extremely effective manner and more like an affliction. Once your kid had the Pokmania, it was over. There was no cure. You were simply stuck buying trading cards and figurines for your ill child until the fever passed, not that anyone at the time had any idea of when it would.

What were some of the symptoms? At first, one could expect their child to wake up early (usually around six-thirty to seven in the morning) to catch Pokmon on TV. And, if the disease didnt clear up, then eventually you might find them huddled intensely over Game Boys with friends, connected with a link cable and spreading the virus among one another. They would be sprinting into their local malls to participate in trading card game events. The sick could often be witnessed asking movie theater employees if they had any more special edition cards before dragging their parents along as they crowded into a dark room to watch both a nearly dialogue-free short film about Pokmon playing with one another and then stay for a Pokmon feature film that followed. The truly ailing might even one day ask you to take them to a nearby theater to see the characters perform live .

Pokmania came swiftly and without much warning. At first there was the anime on TV screens and then, within weeks, a game on shelves. The 1998 Christmas season saw a solid number of Pokmon offerings, and by the next years holidays, those offerings had increased exponentially. There was seemingly no stopping Pokmon , forcing those out of the loop to wonder just how so much had come so fast out of nowhere.