‘The kids were right’: 30 years of Pokémon, from school-wide bans to multimillion-dollar trading cards

There’s a generation of Australians for whom Cheez TV was a religion. Every morning before school, I’d sit in my little white plastic chair about three feet from our big wooden television and watch 90 minutes of cartoons “curated” by the show’s teenage hosts, Jade and Ryan. Premiering in 1995, Cheez TV dominated the children’s breakfast market by 1998, stealing the crown from Channel Seven’s bogan-muppet icon Agro.

A daily dose of Cheez TV was such an important ritual to me that I remember feeling active resentment towards Princess Diana’s death because the news coverage bumped Earthworm Jim. But in September of 1998 my world was rocked when Jade and Ryan introduced something unlike anything I had ever seen – a Japanese cartoon called Pokémon. I remember sitting there, tinned spaghetti-soaked toastie in hand, gripped by a feeling of meteoric magic and wonder as the opening bars of the theme song rolled over me: “I want to be the very best / like no one ever was.” Yes, I thought, yes!

I want that more than anything! But it wouldn’t be long before Pokémania became a moral panic in the Australian media – not so much a kids’ cartoon as a national security threat. Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, Pokémon was created by zinester turned game designer Satoshi Tajiri, developed by his company Game Freak and released in Japan by Nintendo as a sort of swan song for the ageing Game Boy.

In Japan, it rapidly transformed from a schoolyard phenomenon to a national one, but it would take two years before it arrived in the west and became as omnipresent as Zubats in a dark cave. It crash-landed in Australia via Cheez TV and, within a month of its debut, my life (and an entire generation of lives) revolved around the singular quest to “catch ’em all”. When the Game Boy games hit Australian shelves, they were an instant sensation too, jointly selling more than 400m worldwide.

For the uninitiated, these games asked the player to explore a region called Kanto to collect, research and battle an enormous variety of creatures known as Pokémon. I became so immersed in the world they presented – mythical animals and explorable forests and caves – that I felt my sense of what was possible, from my imagination to life itself, actively shift and expand. So of course, my school, the media and Australia at large responded to it like it was a plague devouring the hearts, souls and minds of the nation’s youth.

He handed over to a reporter who called it “a worldwide craze over a collection of odd-looking creatures. One hundred and fifty-one, to be precise. With names like Pikachu, Meowth and Giber”. (There is no Pokémon that goes by the name “Giber”.) The release of the Pokémon Trading Card Game midway through 1999 turned recess and lunch into something resembling the two-up game from Wake in Fright.