How big was Pokemon back in the day?

How old are you?

>>32185082
I wish I knew anon. Too bad I was born about years before Pokémania hit the states.

>>32185082
Too big for you if you have to ask, underage.

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>>32185082

>>32185082
The biggest Generation 1 pokémon, Onix, was 28 feet 10 inches tall.

Reminder that people who were born as soon as March 27th, 1999, can post on 4chan without breaking the rules

>>32185082
It was literally everywhere, and it was magical

Imagine Pokemon Go, now imagine it was advertised in literally every venue or on every product you could find, then imagine it lasted 18 months instead of 2

>>32185082
4 U

>"back in the day"

>>32185082
about 3 feet 50

>>32185082
bigger than Spongebob

two litres

>>32185082
Remember Pokemon GO craze last July?

It was a bit like that except it lasted almost 2 years instead of 1 month and it flooded the market with a metric ton of merch/ads on literally everything you can possibly imagine (pens, yoghurts, nappys, fast food chains, even planes).

>>32185082
Bigger than any fad we've seen I'd say. Maybe like, the Marvel around when the Avengers came out.

>>32185082
When Red and Green were first released it did pretty well, but nothing too amazing. But then word of mouth starting propelling it higher and higher and then they decided to make a big marketing push in the West. You might be surprised to learn it worked REALLY well.

>>32185082
Bigger than Kiss and Hello Kitty... for 8 months.

>>32185082
It was a big guy

>>32185082

Smaller than Star Wars in its heyday.

We were playing Pokemon while talking about Pokemon and drawing Pokemon while watching the Pokemon anime while playing with our Tomy Pokemon figures, Burger King Pokemon figures, and little Pokemon figures that came with Pop-tarts while wearing Pokemon shirts and shoes while eating Pokemon cereal.

It was a little fucked up honestly.

>>32185082
it was the second most searched thing on the internet in 1999
first is porn obviously

>>32185082
Questions like that always makes me wonder if the poster thinks Pokemon isnt popular anymore

watch the south park episode

>>32187236
Well, it's nowhere as popular as it was back in its heyday

>>32187210 is right, Pokemon used to be unhealthy levels of popular at its peak. I'd compare it to the current smartphone craze in its sheer ubiquity.

>>32187286
The fact it's second only to Mario (who, let's face it, will never be toppled) in about two-thirds of the time shows that while the mania died, there is still an enormous dedicated fanbase. I think proportionally it's probably as popular as ever if you discount the kids who were only followers of trends the first time around.

>>32185585
>>32187016

Pretty much this. Plus you add in the anime, which for many people was the first time they'd ever seen Japanese cartoons. Now imagine you're roughly 10 years old (same age as the protags) with an overactive imagination about everything. Pokémania was intense and even more impressive because this was pre-internet for most places.

You know how in November/December, everything is over saturated with Christmas? It was like that but went on for a few years. Almost every single store had something Pokemon related in it. From the grocery store deli to local vhs rental stores selling stuffed animals. I went to burger king in one year more than I have in the rest of my lifetime. No one questioned what to watch on tv or what to get someone for their birthday. Every kid I knew had a binder full of cards to a game they didn't even know how to play. My school had a stuffed pikachu that was used as a puppet. Sneaking your gameboy to school was too risky because you risked another kid stealing your cartridge. For nearly two years, you life was pokemon.

>>32187756
Man, just thinking about Pokemania again is making me feel fuzzy inside. I come from a pretty rainy/grey country, but it's always sunny in Kanto. So when summertime rolled around and everything was green and warm, I used to love exploring the meadows and fields around my house; pretending I was a trainer and trying not to feel bummed out that in the Poké world I was old enough to be setting off on my own like Ash.

>>32187762
>you risked another kid stealing your cartridge
Tfw I was one of those kids, because I got my own stolen. Probably took around 3 games. Gave them all back eventually though

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>>32185082
The year is 1998.
Pokemon had just been unleashed on the United States.
WIthin the first few months, rumors to get mew are abound from Friend to Friend. Awful Merchandise starts to accumulate everywhere.

Then the States gets hit by the anime. The overwhelming popularity of Pokemon permits a shit protag, shit animation, and shit dialog to be catapulted to some of the most viewed cartoon lists. Only by 2003 will it begin to descend to it's rightful place in the cartoon hierarchy.

It's partway though 2000, the States are hit hard with a ton of 3rd party Merchandise in which Nintendo is not involved. Everything from quater-machine toy dispensers to Gas Stations had these knock offs of warped, pokemon-look a likes.

Then it happened. Sometime between late 2000 to 2002, normies got tired of the Ultra-Autists screaming about their Pokemon. Pokemon was put on a de facto list of Shit Subjects and slowly, but surely, between 2002 to 2004, the fandom heavily contracts. If you liked pokemon, you were not permitted to talk about it out in the open, lest you put yourself at risk of open ridicule.

Sometime in 2006, Pokemon makes a very minor resurgence with gen 4. If you bothered to check the Anime, you might have noticed a subtle, but well appreciated bump in it's story telling. However, Pokemon is still on the Shit Subjects list. No more pokemon merchandise really to be found, except in small pockets in toy stores, as opposed to fucking everywhere.

Any true pokemon fans who desired to live a normal life would have decided the "no one must ever know my secret" strategy to be the best. The few autists who still cling to pokemania are frequently mocked, only a smidgen higher in the deplorable hierarchy than rabid sonic fans.

10 years later, Pokemon Go gets released. It's not as big, else the fake merchandise would have hit gas stations and quarter-vending toy machines hard. But hey, the normies loved it till the servers went to shit.

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Remember when the first Pokémon movie showed up, and that trainer released Donphan? "What fucking Pokemon was that?" I remember kids lost their shit. We had no idea Gen 2 would be a thing.

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>>32187881
>It's not as big, else the fake merchandise would have hit gas stations and quarter-vending toy machines hard.
Anon...

>>32187979
I remember arguing with my brother over who the Pokemon in the first episode really was. I firmly believed it was Fearow lmao

>>32188017
Is the fire rising?

Kids these days...
They don't know...
They missed out...

>>32187881
>Pokemon makes a very minor resurgence with gen 4
Eh not really. The scope of it was still pretty small compared to gens 1 to 3.

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>>32188053
Y O U
H A V E
S U M M O N E D
M E

>>32188068
REMEMBER THE 90S?
People played with pokemon cards
I remember someone throwing his in the school toilet.
I wore an areodactyl shirt that was purple. And would chant areodactyl while runnimg around!
God i even had a pichu and pikachu transparent gameboy

I would pretend that any open field was a good place for a pokemon battle and have imaginary battles with wild pokemon in the woods.

>>32187300
I remember some anon at /v/ doing a "Smash character recognition" survey in his local department store just before Smash 4 came out, and Pikachu beat Mario as the most recognizable character by 1 point.

>>32185082
every kid was into it more or less. kids (even adults) knew who pikathu was and talked about it. i was a big fan buying the original games and cards.

How did you guys handle the mania ending though m

>>32188124
It ended right when I started being interested in pussy. I handled it pretty well.

>>32188124
stopped caring about the serise after gen 2. gen 3 was when eveything started to die down and people either grow out of it or got into other things.

>>32188127
>>32188143
Bascially other fads arose.

>>32188124
I continued playing the games without any care in the world. Didn't really miss any of the cards, stale anime and shitty merch since the games is what I liked the most and gen 3 was amazing. I generally avoided mentioning that I still play Pokemon after I finished the elementary school though, normie kids could be dicks about it.

>>32188168
Fuck i know right.
I got bullied so much because of pokemon. I started hating other people in mid school.

>>32188172
I could talk about Pokemon just fine right till the end of the elementary school (which is 12-13 yo where I live). I even knew a fat, if a bit onoxious kid with whom I played with together. Things went straight to the shitter once I started the middle school. Got bullied a lot when I once made a mistake of bringing my GBA to a school break, but I always valued my own hobbies more than I did the human contact, so I never let them make me drop from Pokemon. I never liked anyone from that school anyway, literally not a single person with whom I keep in touch with nowadays.

>>32188124
I got lucky I guess. About 2001~2003 I started to get burned out and my peers were starting to shit on it.

In addition to having stopped playing the card game because, as a friend of mine put it: "Why not just play a game of flip the coin and call it? Same amount of strategy and 1/1000th times faster."

I played RSE when it came out and felt that it was missing something that made me fall in love with the first two.

I kept picking up the games (except for Gen 5 due to graduate school).

Frankly it was easy when both reality took over + you only get the games, though to be honest, pokemon from Gen 1-2 still remain my favorite set, probably due to nostalgia.

>>32188168
I'm sorry for you man, in highschool I used to 3ds and played pokemon and other shits, no one gave a fuck about it. In fact, we used to play mario kart in turns with my classmates.

>>32188766
I used to bring my 3ds*

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>>32187979
I remember going to the theater to see that movie, and all the kids in the room gasped when Snubbull, Marill, and Donphan were shown.

>>32187979
>We had no idea Gen 2 would be a thing.
Come on dude, it was a fucking no-brainer they would eventually make more of them, just like with every other collectible craze of the time like Gogo's Crazy Bones. It was still exciting to see it take form in the way it did, new and unknown Pokemon being teased across various media way before I even heard about the sequel video games.

>>32188766
Nice. Unfortunately my middle school class was a total Chad central full of proverbial and actual faggots trying too hard to emulate the adults.