That’s *Pika*chu, of course. The little yellow Pokemon is the figurehead of the biggest videogaming phenomenon of all time. We sent Stuart Campbell out with a handful of Ultra Balls to capture the truth.

The word "phenomenon" is tossed around all too lightly in the videogames business whenever anything sells more than about 50 copies. So before we start, I’d like you all to do me a little favour and take a look at the "RAICHU RULES THE WORLD" boxout elsewhere on these pages. Done that? Good. Now let’s try to take in some of those numbers. 50 million copies – that’s one for every two Game Boys sold anywhere in the world in the machine’s entire lifespan (and Pokemon has been available for less than half of that time). That’s somewhere in the mindboggling region of $2 BILLION in revenue from, essentially, a single title. And what’s more, a single title for a 10-year-old black-and-white 8-bit handheld, viewers. (Take note, PC developers, the next time you’re about to say "Oh, what the hell, we can’t make this run properly, let’s just up the minimum spec to a P3-450 with a Voodoo 5.") And if you factor in the number of Game Boys sold purely to play Pokemon on, as the game single-handedly dragged the format from the jaws of death and into its most successful year ever - an incredible 10 years after its launch – PLUS the revenues made from the dizzying range of other merchandise, the value of the little Pocket Monsters to Nintendo takes on an almost unimaginable magnitude.

What’s more, Pokemon’s success comes despite the fact that it actually has a very narrow appeal – the vast majority of players are early or pre-teens, flying in the face of the industry’s vision of today’s gamer as a trendy 24-year-old Loaded reader with a high disposable income and a shedful of Chemical Brothers albums. So, just to recap: the graphics are crap, it’s in black and white, it’s ultra-repetitive in play and only little kids like it. And it’s the most successful game there’s ever been. Huh?

Faced with an enigma like this, there was only one thing to do – go straight to the top. Unfortunately, CTW refused to send me on a three-week fact-finding mission to Japan, so I had to settle for the next best thing, in the kindly and avuncular shape of Dick Francis, MD of Nintendo’s Western arm, THE Games. Marching into THE’s cavernous warehouse of an office just outside the charming and picturesque port of Southampton, I got straight to the point.

CTW: So, let’s be frank – Pokemon really saved Nintendo’s bacon, didn’t it?

DF: Yeah, we’re very grateful that it’s happened. It’s come at a very good time for us - between platforms - and I think it’s been a Godsend for retail too in the current circumstances.

CTW: So was it planned that way all along, then? Did some cunning Nintendo market strategist foresee exactly how the industry was going to pan out back in 1995 and plan the release of Pokemon to fill the gap? Because if not, how the heck did it manage to take two years to get from Japan to here?

DF: We first launched the game as Pocket Monsters in Japan in 1996, and because it’s so Japanese in its culture, there was a real question over whether that would transfer successfully into the West. There was a lot of consideration about it, some very strong opinions on both sides of the argument, and in fact it was Minoru Arakawa’s decision to make the huge investment involved in translating the whole thing – we’re talking about tens of millions of dollars worth. There were lots of very mixed feelings from various quarters, but he backed the right horse.

CTW: So why was it so expensive? In terms of memory the game is tiny – only 1 megabyte – and there isn’t really all that much text in it, so isn’t it just a normal translation job? Why would it take so much longer than any other Japanese-to-English conversion?

DF: Well, with Pokemon it’s not just the game. There was all the work involved in that, but all the other elements of the phenomenon, like the TV series, had to be changed and translated as well to fit in. That took a lot of time, and we then launched it in America and Australia in October 1998. For the European version, we decided we wanted a pan-Europe release, so it had to be translated again into Spanish, French, German, Italian and so on, which took another year.

CTW: So it was purely logistics, rather than strategy?

DF: It’d be nice to think that someone back at Nintendo in Japan had been sitting there saying "Well, when these new machines run their course there’s probably going to be a transitional period around the end of 1999, so we’ll make sure we’ve got something big ready then", but I don’t think it was as well thought-out as that...

CTW: The big question, of course, is - how do you explain the phenomenon?

DF: I’d explain it in two ways. Firstly, I think it’s unique in the sense that it’s very all-encompassing. You don’t want to put it down, you always want to be catching the next Pokemon, evolving one to the next level or whatever. The other thing is that it’s been a long time since something’s developed in that way, with all the trading and collecting and the spinoffs with the cards and so on. Kids have always collected things, from cigarette cards to tea cards or whatever, but there’s been no real outlet for that for ages. And the thing with Pokemon, unlike those, is that it’s always evolving. There are always new Pokemon, always new things to do – with Gold and Silver, there’s so much new stuff in there - like the real-time clock and the breeding, for example - it takes the game to a whole new level.

CTW: If you read the mainstream press Pokemon is everywhere, but there’s hardly ever a mention of the actual Game Boy game. Do you think there are a lot of Pokemon fans out there who don’t even know the GB version exists, or indeed that it was the source of the whole craze?

DF: I don’t think so. We’ve done a lot of research on this, and the amazing thing about Pokemon fans is their incredible thirst for knowledge. I think there might be some confusion about what came first, whether it was the trading cards or the Game Boy game or whatever, but they know that the Nintendo brand is inherent behind the whole phenomenon. They all seem to know, for example, that there was a Green version released in Japan, though Green has never been seen in any non-Japanese form or ever mentioned officially in the West. Generally, their knowledge is very high, and that’s driven by this amazing thirst to know more and more about what Pokemon is in all its forms.

CTW: The trick, presumably, is in the management and feeding of that constant thirst for new information?

DF: Absolutely, yes. But it’s more than that - it is about the gameplay. The reason seven million people have just bought Gold and Silver in Japan is that there’s always something innovative, something different in the game. One of the interesting and unique things about Pokemon is that the game itself constantly evolves.Each new game isn’t not just a technical upgrade – the playing experience is different, there are different things in there, it’s always new and fresh. Whereas if you just keep churning out the same Tomb Raider game again and again, people definitely do get fed up of it eventually. Following this formula, we can sustain the Pokemon brand - and a brand is what it is - for years to come.

CTW: So what sort of unique and ever-evolving things can we expect to see, then?

DF: Oh, there’s a lot. Obviously there are things in development that I can’t tell you about now, but we’ll be following Pokemon Stadium with Pokemon Snap on N64 in September, then Pokemon Puzzle League – a sort of Tetris-type game, basically - before Christmas. On the Game Boy there’s Pokemon Pinball this September, the Game Boy version of Puzzle League, and then Pokemon Card Game in November. We launched that one in the US in April, and it’s sold half a million already. And of course, we’re just about to release Pokemon Yellow – Pikachu Edition over here. I don’t know what the record for a day-one shipment in the UK is, but Yellow will ship between 450,000 and half a million.

CTW: Isn’t it basically exactly the same as Red and Blue, though? Where does that fit in with the evolving, innovating formula?

DF: Well, it’s a bit easier to play, some of the Pokemon are easier to catch, there’s a lot more focus on Pikachu. It is basically very similar, and obviously part of its sales will be at the expense of Red and Blue, but it’s done tremendously well in the territories where it’s been released.

CTW: Conventional wisdom says the average gamer now is 24-28, and the traditional kids audience that dominated the 16-bit era has been left behind. Does the success of Pokemon show us something about the true state of the market? Have we been kidding ourselves all this time that we’re a more adult-oriented business?

DF: I think it’s just that the kids market has been ignored for a while and everyone had forgotten about it. Certainly, the primary appeal of Pokemon seems to be the 7-14 age group. There are others – I play it, and I don’t normally play a lot of games, but I always keep a Game Boy and Pokemon in my briefcase. I find it quite relaxing. But Game Boy as a platform has always been aimed at the younger end of the market – that market has always been there, and as long as there are kids it always will be.

CTW: But here’s the funny thing about Pokemon, if it’s a game for kids. If you take away the cute characters, what you’ve got is a game where you go out into the woods, find wild animals, and then attack and savagely beat them until, through pain and exhaustion, they faint and submit to capture and imprisonment inside a tiny ball. You then take them home and train them to attack other wild animals for your amusement and financial profit. Now, take that exact same formula but replace the cute cartoon characters with, say, chickens, and what have you got? It’s cockfighting, isn’t it? Is that a suitable thing to be putting in front of our children?

DF: I wouldn’t see it like that. Nobody dies in this game, they only go to sleep for a while. If you play the game, you’ll see that there’s no physical connection between the two monsters, for example.

CTW: Yes there is – the whole point is that the monsters are physically attacking each other in order to pummel each other into unconsciousness.

DF: Okay, but you don’t physically see it, you just see the Pokemon flashing.

CTW: Well, that’s a pretty slim differentiation. Aren’t you breeding a generation of people who, ten years from now, will be hanging around dirt pits in some godforsaken corner of some woods in Essex watching two rottweilers tearing each other’s throats out for kicks?

DF: I don’t know whether you saw it or not, but there was a BBC documentary recently that looked into the whole Pokemon phenomenon, asking is it violent, is it this and is it that, and a number of psychologists said "Well, is it any different to Cowboys and Indians, any different to bows and arrows?" I think it’s a lot less violent than that – I mean, you could argue that Punch and Judy is exactly the same. I’m not sure if we’d be any less violent a society if we hadn’t had Punch and Judy in those days, you know?

CTW: But you could use those arguments about Doom, Duke Nukem, Mortal Kombat and all the rest.

DF: Those are for an older age group, though. What we’re talking about here is something for 7 to 12-year-olds, and you have to ask "Does it in any way encourage violence or a future violent nature?", and I think it’s quite wrong to even think about that.

CTW: It doesn’t take a particularly wild leap of imagination to see some 9-year-old trying to turn his cat into an Electric Pokemon by plugging its tail into a wall socket, though.

DF: I don’t think it’s any different from playing World War Three, as kids do, you know, digging a hole in the ground and throwing sticks and stones at each other. I mean, there’s no real difference from that. It’s a lot less violent than that in many ways. On a more positive note, Pokemon teaches children to collect, it teaches them to trade, to add value to various things before they swap them...

CTW: So in fact it’s cockfighting crossed with slavery, then?

DF: Well, perhaps. But you know, come on, whatever you do in the world, you’re trading things. I think it teaches kids some useful real skills.

CTW: But that’s the worrying thing – the skills kids learn in Pokemon are so easily translatable. If a kid’s playing Duke Nukem or whatever, he’s not going to suddenly blow his little brother up with a rocket launcher, because he has no access to a rocket launcher. But the environment in Pokemon is so normal – pretty much any kid in the country can get to some woodland or parkland and start beating up squirrels.

DF: You could say that about wrestling, though, you could say that about boxing. You could argue it any way you want, but all the research we’ve done, all the talking to parents, they don’t see it as being in any way harmful to their children, they think it’s rather engaging and rather good.

CTW: That’s sort of the point I’m making, though. Haven’t you managed to sneak this extremely violent and morally suspect game right under parents’ noses, because it comes in the guise of a little cute yellow Trojan horse with pointy ears and a catchphrase? Are you surprised that no one seems to have noticed and you’ve gotten away with it?

DF: There’s no blood in Pokemon, nobody gets killed. We didn’t expect there to be any trouble, and that’s proved to be the case. There are over a million kids out there in the UK playing Pokemon, and I don’t think they’re being in any way harmed by it. There are much more harmful things out there – TV, for example, is a lot more harmful, I’d say, than playing Pokemon. Pokemon don’t resemble real wild animals.

CTW: Eh? Yes they do. Loads of them look exactly like real animals – Squirtle, for example, is a tortoise. Butterfree is clearly a butterfly, Pidgeot is a parrot, Tauros is a bull, Persian looks exactly like a cat, Ekans is a snake... I mean, the names are a bit of a giveaway, aren’t they? I’m scared to let my (Pokemon-obsessed) little cousins come round to visit in case they mistake my pet rats for Rattata and try to make them do a Tail Whip attack.

DF: I think you underestimate the intelligence of consumers. Consumers know the difference between right and wrong, the difference between a game and a fantasy and a reality.

CTW: Even 7-year-old consumers?

DF: Even 7-year-old consumers.

CTW: You’re not sitting here waiting for some tabloid to scream Nintendo Killed My Rabbit all over the front page, then?

DF: No, not at all.

RAICHU* RULES THE WORLD

Total units of Game Boy hardware sold worldwide: 100 million

Total units of Pokemon games sold worldwide: 50 million

Total units of Game Boy Tetris sold worldwide: 30 million

Copies of Pokemon Gold and Silver sold in Japan since November 1999: 7 million

Copies of Pokemon Red and Blue sold through in the UK to date: 1 million

Projected GB hardware sales this year: 20 million

Nintendo’s projected revenue generated by Pokemon in UK this year (including GB hardware): £250 million

Proportion of the value of the entire UK videogames market this represents: 25%

Number of new GB/N64 Pokemon titles due for UK release before Christmas 2000: 6

Proportion of Pokemon owners who don’t currently have an N64: 70%