10 Reasons Pokemon Is The Greatest Franchise In Video Game History
5. The Brand
Going to set my stall out early with this one, and say that no gaming medium has ever spawned a commercial enterprise as big as Pokemon. Financially, maybe Mario has, but he had a 15 year head-start, and when was the last time you saw kids trying to win a plush Toadstool toy in an arcade claw machine?
Never. You have never seen that.
Pokemon on the other hand has been an entertainment juggernaut for nearly 20 years. Toys, cartoons, comics, books, keyrings, toiletries, clothes, stationary, you name it, you can get it with Pikachu's face on it. They've even had a feature film released every single year since 1999.
And what did they call their cinematic debut? They called it Pokemon: The First Movie. Not Pokemon: The Movie, Pokemon: The First Movie. How weighty do your coconuts have to be to walk into a meeting with a film studio and tell them that youre prefixing your film with something that'll only really make sense eight or nine films down the line?
So supremely confident that these films - which, let's not forget, are a mere brand extension to your cartoon thats based on your manga thats based on your game - are going to be so financially lucrative that youre setting your two decade stall out in the title of your first film. Imagine if A New Hope was actually called Star Wars: We'll Still Be Making These In 30 Years, And You'll Still Be Watching Them.
Thats the level Pokemon are - and always were - operating on.