The Current - Why Pokemon fans still try to catch 'em all

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

Fans look back on  30 years of Pokemon, from video games to trading cards, and reflect on what keeps them playing, and collecting, this piece of 90s cultural history. 

The Alto High Speed Rail Project is on track. Expected travel time from Toronto to Montreal, three hours. Next stop, public consultations in your community. Make your voice heard. Visit altotrain.ca for more information. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Cast your mind back to 1996. The Macarena was topping the charts.

Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls won their fourth NBA championship of the decade. and Bill Clinton was re-elected President of the United States. But for some people, the thing that they will remember most from the fall of that year is the introduction of Pikachu to the world. So your kids are using words like Pikachu and Squirtle and Bulbosaur, and you haven't got a clue what they're talking about. Well, welcome to the world of Pokemon. It's the Nintendo game that originated in Japan and has American children going crazy over the game itself,

trading cards, and just about... This is what everyone is. been waiting for. Now, the aim of the game is to collect as many Pokemon characters as you can. And funnily enough, that's exactly what the makers want you to do in real life. Along with the Nintendo Game Boy, Pokemon launched an NMA television show, shortly after that, trading cards. And since its launch, 30 years ago, Pokemon has become the highest-grossing media franchise of all time, beating Marvel and Star Wars. And with new cards and games being released every year, Pokemon continues to find new audiences,

audiences like 7-year-olds, Luca and Ethan in Toronto, who love playing with Pokemon cards. It's kind of hard to explain. Like, you collect by set. These are all the set names, and then when you open them, you put them my number, like, so one, two, three. I just like collecting them, and I kind of like the pictures, too. It's just, like, fun looking at them and trading them.

I like it because, like, when you get a package, you never know what you're gonna get and say if you get something good like a gold then that's really rare draw seven cards and i could play it down because it's a basic Pokemon so you can only play basic Pokemon's on your your first term so then i could use this move Funder Shock which does 20 damage flip the coin its heads and then i get 60 more to help but what if it lands on this side i kind of like Zapdos, and I like the Mew. I'll trade any card unless I like it. That's good strategy.

On top of trading cards, fans are excited to take on Pocopia. This is a new spinoff of the game released this month, the first time that Pokemon has released a life simulation game, allowing players to create their own Pokemon characters. Danny Levine and Blake Olette are excited to try it out. They have been fans of Pokemon since it first launched 30 years ago. Good morning to you both. Good morning.

Blake, there are, and that's hard to believe, but there are people in this world who are uninitiated in the world of Pokemon. Can you explain to them what exactly are Pokemon creatures? Yeah, that's okay. I mean, I get people into my shop to this day all the time that are still hearing about it for, you know, pretty much the first time. Pokemon are little creatures that you can put in your pocket in a Pokemon, and you use them to battle or collect them, all sorts of different things.

can do with Pokemon. And now there are well over a thousand of them. And they live in their own world. They do live in their own world, although with games like Pokemon Go, sometimes it feels like they live in ours, too. We'll talk about Pokemon Go in a moment. How did you get introduced into this world? It came out right at the perfect time. I was about six years old when it first released. So I was right into it with the games, the cards, obviously, the show. And I have been a fan ever since. I've come and gone. I was too cool for Pokemon for a while when I was a little bit older, but yeah, it's been a part of my life since the day it released way back in the 90s. Danny, what about you? How did you come into the world of Pokemon? I was four when it came to

North America, so I was pretty much in it from the beginning. But even before that, we actually had a Japanese exchange student who lived with us. So she had brought cards from Japan over to here to Canada. And that's what I played with first. We're Japanese cards before the were even released here in Canada. What was interesting to you about them? As a kid, I thought a lot of them were cute. So I was very much so into like Volpix, seal, all the cute little more animal-like Pokemon.

I also just like the colors. I know it sounds silly, but I just thought they looked cool. That was as a kid. I mean, I don't know how old you are, but you're not a kid now. What about now? My favorite part about Pokemon, and this is going to sound really corny, but it's really the community. Everybody in the community is amazing. We all bond over these little creatures. I've made so many friends along the way, like Blake, actually, who I met in person not that long ago. But there's

just something nostalgic about them now, too, since, you know, I've been a fan since I've been a kid. But they're just, the community is everything. And I'm sure a lot of people will tell you that. But the community around Pokemon is amazing. It is so nice. so genuine and you can just nerd out, which is something that we weren't always able to do. So that's the best part of it. Can you explain what that community is? Describe it. So I have a shop here in Ottawa, and this is basically the best way I can ever explain what the Pokemon community is like.

We have roughly 30 to 40 players come play Pokemon on a weekly basis. So a lot of people collect the cards. You also have a player base. So there's world competition, international competition, regional competitions for the Pokemon trading card game. And, you know, everybody is so willing to help everyone. We have people who can play at our store who have competed at Worlds. So they've competed on the international level.

And we'll have six-year-olds come in for the first time wanting to play. And those players who have been to Worlds will be the first ones to be like, hey, want me to help you? I can here, want an Arvin. You need this card to make your deck better. I'll give you one. And they won't ask for anything in return. They'll sit there and they'll help the younger generation, learn to play, and let them learn from their mistakes and try again.

And so that's like on the trading card game side for like the players, but even the people who collect, like we have trade nights every month, the last Saturday of every month, we do a trade night. And everybody is willing to help kids out and adults too, but really fostering that next generation of little trainers. Blake, how would you describe that community? Danny kind of crushed it there. I mean, it's generally like 99% an extremely positive place. Everybody is excited just to share their love for Pokemon. I mean, nostalgia is so powerful in this hobby. It's part of the reason why things are so expensive now

because our generation who grew up with it wants to relive, you know, some of those memories and some of those moments and acquire some of these cards that fill our memories and that bring us so much joy. It's so interesting because this is a bunch of different things all at one time. And you mentioned this, Blake, about a decade ago in 2016, this world took on a different flavor in sort of bringing it into the real world. Have a listen to this. It's a location-based app that uses a GPS, so you have to walk around, and it gives you the ability to catch Pokemon like you would in the game.

I got to catch one right now. It's a, so this is a high level. It's a B-drill. So what you do is you just want to toss your Pokemon. It's just really fun to pull up to a spot. If you're driving or to walk over, run over to a Pocostop and see someone and just give that little nod of acknowledgement that you are also catching Pokemon as well. I've got to catch them all. Those are people in Nova Scotia in Newfoundland describing Pokemon Go, which is a phone-based game that allowed people to catch Pokemon out in the real world using augmented reality. Danny, do you remember that?

I mean, one of the things that when that was at its height, you would see people in parks, in areas kind of all gather around just looking at their phone wandering around together trying to find something. Yeah, absolutely. I remember when I came out. Pokemon Go is actually how I found a lot of things in Ottawa. So I was not new to the city, but I really only went to like course bots. And Pokemon Go really forced me to go discover things because I would see like a gym somewhere and be like,

okay, well, oh, this says that it's a nature museum. I'm like, well, I'm going to walk there and I'm going to see it. So I actually discovered a lot of Ottawa with Pokemon Go and something else that's kind of funny. When Pokemon Go came out, I was actually a tour guide here in Ottawa, like in like near parliament. And kids would come, I would did walking tours. So kids would come with their phones and it actually became for like two summers on my tours. I would go to a stop and then it'd be like, okay kids, like this is a Poka stop.

so, you know, come spin the Pocostop. Pokemon Go really got a lot of us who already loved Pokemon played it, but it also introduced a whole new group to Pokemon. And did it, I mean, for you, was it one of those things that kind of gave you new interest in the game or put new life in the game for you? Oh, absolutely. I mean, it included all of the Pokemon that I loved as a kid, but it kind of, it was a new way to,

to catch Pokemon that we had never done before. So I played a lot of the video games, like the console games, and, you know, that you're just sitting at home and playing. But this gave a whole new meaning to, like, catching Pokemon. And even to this day, like, we have a few gyms around the store. And on raid days, we see, like, 30, 40 people walking together, gathering to, like, play. So, like, that was always fun. We got to meet people while playing.

So it really created this whole new love in a different way for Pokemon. Blake, this is your full-time job, right? Pokemon is your life now? That is correct. Yeah, it was my life before the job. But yes, now it's how I pay the bills. And how do you do that? What is the source of income?

I went a bit of a different path than Danny. So I started really like my way to recoup some costs when I got back into collecting the cards was to sell other cards that I didn't want on eBay. So I would do that just so I could keep buying and keep paying for my collecting habit that I was in at the time. And it just snowballed. Then I started to eventually seek out purchasing collections where most of it I could sell and make a decent profit. And it just grew and grew and grew to a point where eventually I'm like, oh, oh, snap, instead of just paying for my collecting, now these cards can actually pay real bills.

They cover the cost of the mortgage and stuff like that. So yeah, it just grew, just expanded. into something that became a lot bigger than was the goal initially and that I ever thought it would be. Can you give people a sense of the size of this business? There was just a trade show, Pokemon trade show in Vancouver. How much money could somebody make at an event like that selling these cards? Well, it ranges. I mean, it's not uncommon for me in a weekend.

You know, I buy a lot there too, but, you know, five figures into the five figures somewhere. But there's, you know, I've heard of vendors at one of those busy shows. that, you know, there's a lot of bigger cards, like really, really valuable cards that move. You know, I've heard of stories where vendors have made into the seven figures in one weekend at a show. That's a lot of money. That is a lot of money. What are the most expensive cards that are out there? Well, I mean, the most expensive one is quite public right now.

It's the illustrator Pikachu in a PSA 10. It's the only copy. What does that mean? The Illustrator Pikachu in a PSA 10? So it was a card that was a card that was. was awarded in a contest in Japan way back in the 1990s, so in the early days. And it's sort of got like this cultural cachet and Pokemon around it. And then a PSA 10 means that it went to PSA and was graded on a scale of 1 to 10.

It was graded a 10. It's been the only copy that's got that grade. There is some controversy surrounding the grade. It's not quite a perfect card. But Logan Paul sold it in an auction for above $16 million a couple weeks ago. $16 million. USD, I believe. When you talk to people about buying and selling these cards, Blake, and it's not for $16 million,

but it's still a lot of money. People are shipping around. What do they tell you about that? Why do they like doing this? Well, it's a combination of investment mixed with nostalgia. Like even Logan Paul, say what you will about him, he's clearly nostalgic and is a fan of the hobby. I think people, you know, they just want to relive that joy. as they get more and more disposable income,

or maybe they're a professional athlete who has way too much disposable income, that's what they're choosing to spend their money on. Obviously, they've seen the appreciation in value over time, but also, you know, they're happy just to own that, like I said, that Charzar that they had when they were a kid, because that's the generation they grew up in. So it's kind of this perfect storm of extreme nostalgia and extreme value now that's all come together to cause this.

That's what I was going to ask, is what is this really about? Is it about nostalgia? Is it about a thing that's a bunch of different things, including a game, something that you can collect, something that you can watch on television, this new game that's coming out? What is it really about, do you think? It's about all of it. Like I said, I think it's a perfect storm of everything. I mean, things like Pokemon Go that come out, it brings so many people back and so many new people in the hobby that it just causes this excitement. They remember that those moments they had as a kid, it brings them into it.

Now there's apps that have come out where you can track your cards like a stock portfolio. And that's kind of gamified purchasing cards in a way that's sort of, you know, caused this additional chaos, cause people to love watching their portfolio go up as you might do on, you know, the Robin Hood app or something to that effect. So it's sort of all these different factors that have come into it, probably deeply rooted in the nostalgia to begin with. And then again, all this money being poured into it from everybody just hitting the sage where They have money to, quote, unquote, invest into something like Pokemon cards that has sort of taken it to a level that we probably never seen for any individual product before in history.

I would imagine. Do you have a favorite Pokemon? I do. I do. My favorite Pokemon is Mew. It was a very mystical Pokemon back in the original games. And there was a lot of rumors on how to find it. And since then, I've always been fascinated with that Pokemon.

What do you love about that one? Again, just the mystery surrounding it. There was like, you couldn't really get it. it without glitching out the game originally. You'd have to like mess with the code in effect. So it was always very mysterious to me. And I've loved it ever since. Danny, what about for you?

My favorite Pokemon is Umbrian, but I like to specify that my favorite is shiny umbrion. So every Pokemon has a shiny variant that kind of makes it a different color. So the original umbriand is black and it has some yellow like accents, but the shiny is black with blue accents. So that is my absolute favorite, but yeah, um, Bria in general as well.

You have a 17-month-old, is that right? Yes, I do. Is the 17-month-old already schooled in the ways of Pokemon? Yes, he picked his starter. The moment he could start walking, we put the three original starters, so Tramander, Balbosaur,

and Squirtle on the ground, and we made him walk to one of the, well, we didn't make him, he chose to walk, but he walked to Squirtle three times in a row. So that was deemed his starter. And I mean, he's in our store all the time. We've been bringing him to the store since he was three weeks old. So he's pretty, pretty in the middle of it already. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. It's good to speak with you both about

this. Thank you very much. Thank you. Danny Levine is a Pokemon collector and cones Danny Rayon Cards and games in Ottawa. Blake Olette has an extensive collection of Pokemon, as you heard, as well, and runs Blake's Toys TGC. It's a trading card game shop in Vernon, British Columbia. The Alto High Speed Rail Project is on track. Expected travel time from Toronto to Montreal, three hours. Next stop, public consultations in your community. Make your voice heard.

Visit altotrain.ca for more information. It's a new season of the hit comedy. Welcome to Small Achievable Goals, the show where two friends get real about menopause and middle. age. Today, we're talking hot flashes. Oh, my God, I'm so hot all the time the makeup is sliding on my face. Welcome to episode three, invisibility. People under the age of 25 literally cannot see me. Episode six, brain fog. Yesterday, I could not remember the word for tree, so I just called it street broccoli. Oh, cute. Small achievable goals. Watch free on CBC Gem.

Daniel Dockery is a tech journalist, author of Monster Kids, how Pokemon taught a generation to Catch them all. He's also a Pokemon archaeologist. Daniel, good morning to you. Good morning, Matt. What is a Pokemon archaeologist? A Pokemon archaeologist is someone that is deeply fascinated by Pokemon's history, not as just a fictional franchise, but as this kind of cultural touchstone that has lasted for long enough to actually have some history you can dive into. Okay, so speak to me as the archaeologist. What is this about? If you go back to the 90s when this thing was created,

what made it so popular and why is it still such a thing? You know, I've been thinking about this, and I think there's four reasons, and I'll give you as quick as I can. The first reason, a reason I'd say is nostalgia, and not just nostalgia for older fans liking, you know, new games or new cards, but nostalgia is baked into the bones of Pokemon

from the very beginning. both the games and the anime are about a 10-year-old leading home for the first time, which is a very wondrous kind of almost mythic experience. In our lives. The second is absolutely commerce. Pokemon has maybe the best branding synergy of any franchise I've ever seen. The third is that Pokemon kind of presents a pseudo-utopian ideal in which nature represented by these monsters,

these monsters in a digital space for us, but in the world these monsters. And mankind and our quest for technological progress, the two things haven't become a barrier to one another. We've managed to coexist in a way that both helps Pokemon and helps mankind. And the last thing is I think Pokemon is all about connection and broadening the various definitions of connection. You can look at Pokemon as a connecting force,

whether you want to share your collection with other people, or whether you want to compete with other people, or whether you just want to communicate about your favorites with other people. Pokemon, over time, has proven that it's best when it's enjoyed with other people. What did that game that came out a decade ago, Pokemon Go, do to juice this franchise and put new life into it, if I can put it that way? Pokemon Go, Pokemon Go really reawaken Pokemon as a cultural force in a way that it quite hadn't been in a little while. one thing about the Pocomania years, which is what my book, Monster Kids is about the late 90s,

is that Pokemon wasn't just huge, it was being talked about all the time. You know, whether it was being talked about with Venom or talked about with Embrace, you know, varied from person to person. But you could, you know, you go on the local news at night and they'd be talking about Pokemon, and you go on MSNBC,

and they'd be doing a report on Pokemon, and Pokemon was one of the biggest movies of the year. And so it, you know, it was everywhere. You couldn't escape it. And what Pokemon Go did is kind of bring back not just Pokemon as a popular thing, because Pokemon's pretty much always been popular, but Pokemon as a conversation piece. All of a sudden, people were talking about it and what it meant to the world again.

And I think that was probably Pokemon Go's biggest impact is that it wasn't, you know, there's plenty of massive smartphone games out there. But Pokemon Go, by being about Pokemon and by inviting so much chatter about it, And so much controversy and community and equal measure really helped Pokemon gain, again, that cultural prominence that it had back when it first debuted. It's also about a lot of money. And it's not just people selling cards for $14 million. I said in the introduction that this is the world's highest grossing media franchise, more than Star Wars, more than the Marvel universe, bigger than Barbie. How is something like that possible?

I mentioned earlier that Pokemon might have the best branding synergy of any franchise of all time. But I think what Pokemon does better than most companies that have ever seen in my lifetime is that it invites fans in a very, very accessible way to not just engage with one part of it, but to engage with all parts of it and to engage with parts of it at different times of your life. Like one may get into the anime when they're younger because, you know, you can't read as well. So the games and the cards are a little bit out of your league, but you watch the anime and you think, oh, I relate to, you know, this flashy cartoon. And then later, the anime, you know, by its subject matter, invite you to come play the games, which is essentially you living out the events of the anime on your own terms.

And then you play the games, and you get obsessed with those and you want more. So, you know, maybe you check out the cards. And maybe you check out the battle systems and strategies of the cards and see how they relate to the tastes and specifics that you've built up in the games. I think a lot of Pokemon's monetary success is based around it having a bunch of different pillars

and they're not really being a blockade between them. You know, like, for example, if you go to see a superhero movie, you watch it and you'll see a very singular version of that superhero, that if you read the comics, you'll be like, this isn't the same story at all. With Pokemon, you don't really have that. They're different identifiable pillars, but Pokemon is very good about when you have had your fill of one,

they say, come check out this next one, and come check out this next one. and you kind of grow up with it in that way. So it retains a fan base in a long way. The new next one is this new game that's just been released, right? Bucopia, yeah. How is that being received by the Pokemon universe? Very, very well.

The thing that I've been kind of most delighted to see is the fact that it really latches on to Pokemon as characters by giving a lot of these monsters and characters' little personalities, they endear themselves to you. And a lot of the character traits that may not have been as present in various games before, but you've always kind of imagined that they are present, are now pushed to the forefront. And I think that means a lot to people, especially those that have a really, that don't just play Pokemon or enjoy Pokemon, but have a real personal

connection to it. Can this continue? This is the 30th anniversary of Pokemon. Nothing lasts forever, but this seems to be lasting for a long time and continues to grow and grow. How long can this go, do you think? You know, when Pokemon first came out in the United States, there was a lot of kind of doom saying about it, about the fact that, oh, this is another Beanie Baby. It's just a fad. Yeah, because during the late 90s was the heyday, not the heyday, every decade has stuff that comes and goes,

but we were particularly inundated by collecting fads, from Beanie Babes to everything else. And so a lot of people predicted that Pokemon would last maybe a few weeks until the next big thing came out. And then it lasted months. And then it became kind of the defining franchise that ended the 1900s, into the 20th century, and then it kept going and going and going.

So, you know, I don't see an end to Pokemon. Pokemon is so adept, and the creators behind it, are so adept at retaining parts of the previous generation that played it, while also making it ultimately accessible to the next generation. And that's why, you know, every new version of the games is called generations, because they kind of expect that some kids are going to go off to middle school, or get a little bit older and maybe grow out of it for, you know, kind of dip out of it for a little bit. But there's going to be an entire new wave of kids that are fresh and ready to find out what this whole Pikachu thing is about.

What do you love about it? I think it goes back to my own childhood and even my interest now, you know, growing up, I loved monsters. I loved anything that was misunderstood or gigantic, everything from Frankenstein to Godzilla. I loved it. And I loved dinosaurs because they were big and made. misunderstood and they weren't here anymore. So, and Pokemon are very dinosaur-like, at least some of them are. And Pokemon really checked off a lot of boxes for me in taking all of my, you know, a lot of

my individual interests and saying, hey, we've distilled and purified it into this one interest, kind of a one-stop shop for everything I was obsessed with. But instead of monsters being misunderstood, all of a sudden, you know, befriending monsters and finding your unique connection with them was the point of the game, and that kind of lit my life up. And I think to this day, as someone that still loves monsters, I like a game that is so adamant about the fact

that we are able to make connections with anyone, that Pokemon is kind of a universal language, and that finding your own singular connection with these creatures is very empowering, both as a child and as an adult. It might be the biggest franchise of all time, but there's a lot of room for personal taste in Pokemon. And I think that makes it very appealing to me. Still, even if I'm not the 10-year-old who's staying up in my childhood bedroom, playing the Game Boy in the crack of the door

left open. Who's your favorite? Dragonite. Because? It's a large, powerful dragon, but it also has a very, you know, it has a lot of ties to mythology, has a lot of ties to pop culture. Dragonite's inspirations range from everything from Ray Harry House and movies to Godzilla, to Dragons of Myth and Japanese folklore. It's just a combination of a lot of interesting stuff. And so my interest in it is only deepened as I've been able to learn better ways to describe it than, oh, it's big and cool. I love that you just described it as this franchise lit up your life. That's a really powerful thing to say.

As someone that writes about pop culture of living, my interests have varied since then. But Pokemon has remained kind of a constant because as the number of monsters, increases and as it keeps going, both the past, the Pokemona years that I grew up in, and the present where I'm watching, you know, and essentially an entire Pokemon economy pop up in the cards, there's always stuff to be interested in. Daniel, thank you very much for this. Oh, no problem, Matt. Daniel Dockery is the author of Monster Kids, how Pokemon taught a generation to catch them all.

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