What happens when all the Pokémon fans are dead?

Can I be a real smug male gamer? Is this a safe space? You see, I — Christopher Thomas Plante — liked Pokémon before everybody else.

In 1996, Pocket Monsters launched in Japan alongside a shrewd and relentless barrage of merchandise. By October, the most potent tie-in, the Pokémon Trading Card Game, cemented the series' status as a national hit. And before the calendar flipped to 1997, word of the “next great video game trend” reached a bespectacled preteen in the Kansas City suburbs via the rumors pages of a tattered video game magazine.

There, in the periodicals aisle of the Hy-Vee grocery store, I was converted (by a few lines of copy and a scrap of low-res art) into a Pokémon fan. The first of my kind. Well… at least in the United States. Maybe. Over the following two years, I volunteered as Pokémon’s envoy to a small, indifferent Midwest town. At the close of each month, when my paltry allowance hit my savings account (read: mason jar), I collected a fresh pack of Pokémon cards printed in a language I couldn’t read  — imported from Tokyo by my local hobby shop owner. Why was he willing to humor this burdensome request from a child? Perhaps because I was the only regular customer under the age of 50, and I didn’t ask questions about Civil War reenactments or model trains. I digress.

In the fall of ’98, Nintendo (finally) released Pocket Monsters in the U.S., freshly localized under a new name: Pokémon Red and Blue. I’d failed to grasp the concept of saving, having spent every dollar on cards to this point. My total net worth: $6. An interminable month between the launch and my birthday passed. Then, at last, on a crisp evening in late October came the cake and the singing and the come on come on come on oh my god they got it for me, Pokémon Red!

I spent the remainder of the year participating in what’s now a shared, beloved elder-Millennial gamer memory: choosing my very first Pokémon, exploring what felt at that time like a limitless open world contained in a grey plastic brick, and draining every AA battery in my family’s home until my parents agreed to invest in rechargeables after discovering the TV remotes had ceased to function. 

A year later, Pokémon was a global phenomenon, spanning games, collectible cards, countless toys, comics, and a TV series. And I was a teenager. In November ’99, my parents asked when we should see the first Pokémon film. “Never,” I told them. I’d moved on to mature, important things, like Soulcalibur on the Sega Dreamcast.