Pokémon Cards

Pokémon was invented by a Japanese man named Satoshi Tajiri and his illustrator friend Ken Sugimori. 

Back in 1982 Satoshi started a gaming magazine called Game Freak, but after a while he decided to start making his own video games, instead of writing about them. In 1989 Game Freak turned into a gaming company, and together with his friends they released a few games which did well.

In the early 1990s, inspired by his childhood exploring forests and finding bugs and tadpoles, Satoshi came up with the idea for Pocket Monsters and pitched it to Nintendo.

On 27 February 1996, Pocket Monsters was released on a Red and Green version for the Nintendo Gameboy, in Japan. The name was shortened from Pocket Monsters to Pokémon.

Since then, seven more generations of Pokémon games have been released. With each new generation more Pokémon joined the game, with now 898 different species of Pokémon.

After the success of the first games, a company called Media Factory created the Pokémon Trading Card Game (or TCG for short). The first set of cards was released in 1996 containing 102 cards. The cards soon became very popular, and three years later, they were introduced to North America and shortly after the rest of the world. 

In 2016 a groundbreaking game landed: Pokémon GO. Players could explore their neighbourhood in the real world, using satellite and augmented reality technology to make it seem like the Pokémon were really there. 

Pokémon has spawned card tournaments, movies, TV shows and plenty of merchandise.