Though to be fair the Pokemania era of the early 2000s was a dead, the same way Pokemon Go had a a short-lived popularity surge in 2016.
Pokemon is enduring.
Reversal of the Law: Mike Godwin himself has stated that his rule does not discredit efforts to make valid comparisons, particularly when democratic institutions are under threat.
that conversation went somewhere along the lines of: "surely kids aren't interested in what their parents were/are interested in" (oh didn't we hate our parents' style) -- and then I remembered that I really wanted to see Speed Racer, which was what my dad was into in the late sixties. i still thought that the animation was about as impressive as pokemon at the time (funny how they animated more frames than one punch man these days!!!)
i think kids these days complain that their fat old parents are wearing (ostensibly 'millennial') graphic tees in public so there is plenty of generational rejection. but it's really weird how the internet hasn't developed more obvious generational 'coding' (except in language), and hasn't rejected things like pokemon entirely.
or is it pretty easy to code us? lol
their rejection of us aside (which is an evolutionary and biological thing) i wonder if our parents felt 'as connected' to us generationally speaking as we 'feel' we are to the next (socioeconomically and socio-digitally)?
The entire current zeitgeist of popular media is about zombifying your parent's IP. It's Nintendo's entire business in fact. Sure, usually they are doing good work with that IP, but they are the outlier in the industry. Everyone else is shitting out remakes of what your daddy played that don't even understand the original material, or like Halo, remakes of what your daddy played which was already a mediocre remake.
Halo 1 came out the month after 9/11. It's old enough to have graduated college and started a family. It will be resold soon.
Jurassic Park was dug up out of the grave to crap out several more movies. Star Wars is inflating a couple good plot lines into an entire Universe of "Content". Even reality shows are made up of people who were contestants on older reality shows. Pixar is making yet another Toy Story.
Aliens is still going, long after it's reanimated corpse was overplayed.
One of the premier television series, that just finished, was all about nostalgia for living in the 80s, with some silly plot tacked on that apparently even the writers didn't care about.
Even our propaganda, like Top Gun, is basically the same script as an 80s movie with minimal changes.
It feels like the entire media ecosystem is designed around reselling content to my parent's generation before they finally kick the bucket or satisfying the nostalgia of that generation's early children. Even the President's administration bitches about things like the 90s USDA food pyramid that only affected that 13ish year segment of the population and was deprecated, twice, since then. Our authoritarianism is nostalgia based, for the time that generation was children, and things were "Simple" and "Good", because they were children and got to live the lives of kids.
But I ordered the new Pocket Taco, which is like a controller that is taco-shaped and clamps around your smartphone, kinda turning it into a gameboy.
They can read Dutch but they have cards with English & Portugese texts. Site helps them learning English :-)
Not long after, I was gifted Pokemon Silver. Played a bit of it. Didn't find it novel anymore. Very rapidly had this feeling of "I see where this is going and I want off this ride". Gave up on Pokemon, and haven't regretted it even slightly.
I know there have been many innovations in the mechanics since (e.g. double battles), and I realize the game has a very large amount of strategy. But it also felt like the same kind of feeling I get from games like MtG ("expensive cardboard"); that also has a lot of depth and strategy and new mechanics, but the "collection" aspect feels painful in an "I can see the Skinner box" way, in ways many other games don't.
I had a similar feeling a few years later, when I played Wind Waker for the first time. That was one of the first games I intentionally decided not to 100%: specifically, I left out the picture gallery, which gave me the same "collectathon" feeling.
1) New players. More of ‘em born every year! And,
2) Competitive play, which is a huge thing (I hate playing most games with randos online, personally, but lots of people love it). Like with any multiplayer game (call of duty, say) you need the latest entry or you’ll be looking at a ghost town in the multiplayer lobbies. Plus you get to experience the meta evolving, so it’s more dynamic than playing on an older one. They’ve got this whole graded ranking and matching system and a bunch of leaderboard stuff going on.
I only know about the latter because I know a guy who usually spends at least a little time way up near the top of the rankings each time a new one of these comes out. Seems like a pretty large scene.
However, even as someone who plays JRPGs. I can't for the life of me understand how adults are playing the games. The pokemon games are painful games to play, full of grinding, massive amounts of rng and just boring turn based combat (compared to other rpgs that exist). Why as an adult you would play Pokemon over SMT is something I can't get. Every time Ive tried ive bounced off newer games hard.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
Oh, I don't want to play Pokémon games, but every few hours, I am given the controller and told to beat the boss with a team composed of 6 low-level Pikachus and zero healing items.
I'm nearing 30 and have played a lot of JRPGs in my life.
bro are you serious? smt is the definition of painful in terms of time sunk and the newer pokemon games have so many guard rails; i can mindlessly blast through the whole story and craft a quick crew to beat down my wife and friends and just be done ;p
now granted, would I rather play (and 100 percent complete) any SMT game? yes. how do adults do it? i watched my friend who's an RN on hospital hours + has three kids blast through cyberpunk and the answer is pretty simple: sleep is for the weak.
Don’t pretend that Game Freak/Creatures/Nintendo are some saints.
I am an elder Millennial with no kids…I knew it was still a popular game, but seeing a great big Pokéball machine next to the shopping carts really drove it home.
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 them. I'm going through Radical Red right now, and its been an incredible time.
For absolutely crazy releases, Pokemon Unbound is an absolutely next level romhack
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 zombies. I don't get it. Yesterday I did see one dad with his kid, and they were out actually walking on the trails. I can understand that. But driving to the park to drive around?! Argh!
end rant. Thanks for listening.
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.
Pack opening is the equivalent of pulltabs or scratch offs. It's an asset class closer to beanie babies than baseball cards, because there is no tie to a rookie going on to have a huge career or anything but artificial scarcity.
Addiction has always been a component here.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
giancarlostoro•1h ago
CobrastanJorji•1h ago
tiznow•1h ago
I'm still a Pokemon fan to this day. I play Go all the time, collect cards when they're not obscene to acquire, and I'll probably buy a Switch 2 when they come out with the upgrade to immerse myself in the online aspect of modern Pokemon games. Fantastic franchise.
alargemoose•54m ago