In 2024, Pokémania is evolving

In 2000, my long-suffering mother took my brother and his friends to the local theater for a showing of Pokémon the Movie 2000. The boys were six or seven and had happily been swept up in the burgeoning cultural phenomenon dubbed "Pokémania." My mother, perplexed by the whole affair, read a book in the back row as the boys gaped at fantastical creatures on screen, their legs not yet long enough to reach the floor.

Less than a year before, the Pokémon franchise had cracked open the gaping maw of the United States gaming market by feeding it the same properties that were already enormously successful in its native Japan. Like many other kids his age, my brother collected Pokémon cards and captured the creatures on his Game Boy. We watched the Pokémon TV series together and tossed a life-sized Pokéball around the house. 

Today, new generations are discovering the franchise as older ones embrace its nostalgia. Nowhere was that clearer than this summer's Pokémon GO Fest, a three-day in-person event celebrating the franchise's mobile game in New York City. There, families in matching outfits bent over their phones together as if saying grace at the dining room table. Babes in strollers clutched stuffed Pokémon toys as their parents discussed capturing new creatures.

Offline, the Pokemon trading card game — which littered early-aughts pavements at recess and became such a distraction that it was banned in some schools — has seen a resurgence. As recently as 2021, a Reddit user shared a photo of a "Pokémon Agreement" hung in their child's classroom, which included rules like "No stealing Pokémon cards!" and "Make fair trades!! [sic]."

Over the past two years, Pokémon cards have also evolved into a top collecting category for adults. Leading authenticator PSA, which has graded more than 70 million items since 1991, says baseball cards were the most popular item until early 2022, when Pokémon cards became its biggest category by volume. Between 2022 and 2023, PSA saw a 50 percent growth in authentication and grading submissions of Pokémon cards, compared to just a 16 percent increase in baseball cards over the same period. 

"We've seen a major surge in the collectibles industry, specifically Pokémon, due to the rising trend of nostalgia-driven primarily by Millennials and Gen Z," Ryan Hoge, president of PSA, told Mashable. "As the first generation of Pokémon collectors have grown up and had kids, they’ve gravitated back to the nostalgic pieces of their childhood and have resurrected the demand for Pokémon trading cards."

PSA has graded only three subjects more than one million times: Michael Jordan and Pokémon characters Charizard and Pikachu. "Charizard and Pikachu have now had 30-year careers spanning multiple generations," a spokesperson for the company noted.

The same nostalgia fueling Pokémon card collecting is also enlivening a dedicated faction of players of the franchise's Pokémon GO mobile game.

The game became a sensation virtually overnight when it was first released in the U.S. in 2016, capturing the hearts of fans and non-fans alike. It used augmented reality to overlay Pokémon in real-world environments, transforming the player into a Pokémon trainer tasked with collecting as many creatures as possible. A key element of the game was that it required the player to walk outside to find new Pokémon in the wild.

At the time, a New York Times writer captured the phenomenon and its ubiquity, explaining, "I saw people catching Pokémon while ahead of me in line for coffee, pointing their smartphone cameras at their barista, who happened to have a Charmander on her face."

Interest in the game amongst the general public quickly petered out. The craze's metaphorical death knell clanged at a 2016 Virginia rally for then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton where, in an attempt to connect with young voters, she told the crowd to "Pokémon GO to the polls." The phrase was swiftly memed and mocked, most notably by then-Republican nominee Donald Trump who posted a Facebook video of a Pokémon GO parody game titled "Crookéd Hillary NO." 

But devout players never left; by 2019, more than 1 billion people had downloaded the app. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, many more returned to the game to escape quarantine restlessness. Today, some estimates put the number of monthly active players at more than 90 million.

Over three stifling days in July, more than 70,000 of those players descended on New York City for Pokémon GO Fest. Neither the 90-degree temperatures nor dew point of 72 — a level the National Weather Service considers "oppressive" — could deter them from capturing the geo-exclusive Pokémon on offer at Randall's Island, a dollop of land in the East River.

Many saw their journey to GO Fest as a kind of pilgrimage. For Rose Dinelli-Figueroa, 36, GO Fest has become a family tradition. She has traveled from Puerto Rico to attend Pokémon GO Fests in Seattle, London, and Las Vegas with her husband, parents, and two children. The family's youngest member, 7-year-old Jade, is dressed as Pokémon trainer Misty and was not yet born when her mother began playing Pokémon GO in 2016.

About a 10-minute walk away, on a large lawn, an Illinois man who goes by "Uncle Bob" stands on an oval of astroturf across from a teen named Theo. They stare at their phones, battling each other digitally in the app. Uncle Bob has attended every GO Fest since the first iteration of the event was held in Chicago in 2017. Theo is far from home and reveling in a thrilling change of pace. "There are not as many players in my hometown [of Wiener Neustadt, Austria]," he tells Mashable. Back in Austria, he usually has to pay to join group gaming activities called "remote raids" in cities with more players.

A couple nearby, Amy, 37, and Gary, 38, use the game to stay connected in their long-distance relationship. "He lives about four hours away from me," Amy says, dressed in a blue body suit, cosplaying as Vaporean, her favorite evolution of the Pokémon Eevee. "And there's a feature in the game where you can send each other postcards. So I have a lot of fun sending him postcards when we're away from each other." 

Pokémon GO appears to be a popular pillar of romantic relationships. Niantic, the app's developer, helped organize five marriage proposals during this year's GO Fest. One of the couples, Alex, 32, and Courtney, 31, began dating in 2020 and play Pokémon GO together while walking their dogs. They came down from New Hampshire to attend Pokémon GO Fest last year, even though Courtney was recovering from foot surgery in a walking boot. "We look back at it like, 'That was so much fun.'" says Courtney. "We were showing [people] pictures of it from last year, and we got some of our friends at work to start playing it as well."

"It's a silly game, but it really does bring people together, as cheesy as that sounds," says Alex, moments after getting down on one knee to propose to Courtney. "It's a great way to just go out and hang out with a friend."

Four friends dressed as Eeveelutions described a more casual relationship to the app. "I love playing. I'm looking at my phone anyway," says Aaron, 33. "It keeps me distracted, it keeps me off Grindr. It gets me out of the house… I was here by myself on Christmas. So I open up Pokémon GO, and I'm like, 'Oh, there's stuff going on.' I was walking all around downtown. I went to Washington Square Park and saw the tree while playing Pokémon GO. It was cute. I wouldn't have seen the tree otherwise."

Another member of the group, Brayden, 29, notes how much the franchise has expanded since establishing its reputation as a children's game of the early aughts. "My mom is like level whatever; she is intense," he says. "She's better at it than I am." He points at his friends standing nearby. "They'll be like, 'Oh yeah, I raided with your mom.'"

Canadian sisters Tania, 49, and Shelley, 53, are two of the oldest attendees Mashable interviewed at the event. When Pokémon GO first dropped in 2016, Shelley says she "didn't want to be one of those old people that just assume that because I don't understand it, it's not cool." So she asked a young person she worked with to explain it to her. "I don't know anything about Pokémon. I didn't play the game. I didn't grow up with it," says Shelley. "But I downloaded it and was like, 'This is fucking fun.'" Two weeks later, on a family vacation, she got Tania hooked on the game, too.

It seems that the core of Pokémon brand's legacy — what has made it the highest-grossing media franchise on earth and an enduring cultural phenomenon for 25 years — is its ability to bring people together to have a good time.

The sisters point to their bright yellow paper Pikachu hats, which organizers distributed for free to attendees earlier in the day. "We had to get the hat. We were asking little kids, 'Where'd you get your visor?'" Tania laughs. "It's ridiculous, and we love it. You've gotta lean into the fun."