When I was a kid, I had this red ring binder. Inside were plastic sleeves filled with pieces of cardboard. Printed on those bits of cardboard were mythical creatures, some of which are now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where that binder is today…God only knows.
Pokémon: A cultural phenomenon that’s booming like it’s never boomed before.
Since moving to the US, I’ve been swept up in its nostalgic clutches. Obsessively so. Spare moments are no longer spare, now spent trawling eBay and card shops for Pokémon I took a shine to as a child. Alakazam, Zapdos, Mew, Poliwrath and Venusaur to name a few.
As a young kid, I was drawn to the colour and movement of it all: the shimmering holographic cards, the touching anime series, the adventurous Game Boy games. Now, at 33, I’m fascinated by Pokémon’s origin story, its lore.
It all began with a kid named Satoshi Tajiri and his fascination with insects. In the 1960s, Satoshi grew up in Machida, a semi-rural town on Tokyo’s outskirts. Picture forests, streams, and rice fields dotted with quaint neighbourhoods. Here, children could roam, and I mean really roam – disappearing for hours to explore the abundance of nature on their doorstep.
Tajiri wasn’t just interested; he was hooked. He spent countless hours exploring Machida with a fine-tooth comb, looking for beetles, dragonflies, centipedes and everything in between.
But this wasn’t just a child collecting bugs. Tajiri’s fascination had an artisan-like quality. He recorded where each insect lived, when it appeared, and, most importantly, how to catch it without harming it. It’s hard not to admire the fellow. This was never about building a billion-dollar empire. It was simply about sharing something he genuinely cared for and hoping others might feel that same sense of wonder.
Tajiri collected insects in jars, studied them with friends and, most importantly, began trading them. So much so that his classmates nicknamed him “Dr Bug”. A fitting title for a boy hellbent on learning all he could about these technicoloured beings and literally “trying to catch them all”.
As Tajiri grew older, he watched this natural utopia disappear beneath Tokyo’s expansion. Forests became buildings and streams became roads. This only strengthened his desire to give future generations the same sense of discovery he’d experienced, even if they could no longer trawl the countryside as he had.
The 1970s ushered in the arcade game movement. Tajiri was now a teenager, the target market for these machines that were beginning to reshape entertainment (think Space Invaders). Here too, Tajiri’s participation wasn’t just about playing games; he was curious, asking how the mechanics worked, whether the machines could be beaten, and wondering about their addictive nature.
By 1981, Tajiri was 16 and searching for a place to pour out this mountain of ideas and questions in his mind. Enter Game Freak – a handwritten magazine of his own creation, a place to analyse and critique arcade games. At the time, gaming journalism wasn’t really a thing, but people soon started catching on. One such reader was illustrator Ken Sugimori.
Soon after meeting, the two struck up a friendship. Ken admired the way Tajiri thought about things, his perspective. The pair couldn’t have been more different, but together they became the perfect partnership. Tajiri’s brain understood systems; Sugimori’s understood visuals. My girlfriend and I are disparate peas in a pod, so I’m always a sucker for relationships like this.
By 1989, Game Freak had assembled a team of friends gifted in programming, music and visual arts. Then, on what was no doubt an otherwise ordinary day, someone posed a simple question:
“Why don’t we stop writing about other people’s games and make our own?”
An ambitious undertaking, given their limited funding and the fact that gaming was, by then, one of Japan’s most competitive industries. From the outset, people struggled to latch onto the game’s premise of collecting and trading these creatures. Most gamers at the time thought it should focus solely on battling and defeating Pokémon.
Another key hurdle was the console it would run on: Nintendo’s Game Boy, which had limited memory and processing power. Every Pokémon (of which there were 151) took up precious room. Tinkering with each creature’s size and technical details to optimise space was a struggle.
For the next six years, the Game Freak crew toiled away, buried in world-building and character design – fine-tuning and then fine-tuning some more. Tajiri and Ken were known to constantly challenge one another, for the better, mind you. Nitpicking what role each Pokémon played and whether it felt believable. It was this back-and-forth that brought characters like Pidgeot and Magikarp to life; creatures that looked like they could inhabit sea and sky.
At one point, they came dangerously close to running out of money. The team shrank to a handful of core members, some working for almost no pay, simply because they believed in what they were building and wanted to see it through. Without these desperate efforts, Pokémon might never have made it.
Pokémon Red and Green Game Boy cartridges hit the market on 27th February 1996. They weren’t an overnight success, but once kids started catching onto the fact that different Pokémon were available to them depending on what version they had, things started to shift.
Conversations on school playgrounds and in the halls became the brand’s greatest marketing campaign. Students swapping the two versions between one another became the spark plug for Pokémon Trading Cards, which would take the franchise to the stratosphere.
Once the cards hit the shelves, Pokémon became real. Tactile. I still remember begging my parents for pocket money so I could dash to my local corner store and buy a few booster packs, each containing 10 cards, one of which was rare or holographic. A “shiny,” as we called them in Australia. Back then, these packs cost about $6; in 2026, they can fetch well over $ 1,500. In late June, a professionally graded “shiny” Charizard card sold for US$462,500, which is close to AUD $650,000. Mind-boggling. After a bit more financial perspective? The Pokémon market is +28% year to date, outperforming the S&P 500 by a whopping 15%. Remember we’re talking about cardboard here.
Not only could you physically own Pokémon, but you could battle them on your tabletop, with a range of attacks, weaknesses and resistances. Genius.
Before long, millions of kids, myself included, carried Pokémon cards around in sleeve-filled binders, played and traded them with friends. A strange full-circle moment for Tajiri when you think about it. It all started with him collecting and later trading bugs in jars, and now the gamified version of that idea was capturing kids everywhere, many of whom hoped the next booster pack they ripped would reveal their favourite sparkling Pokémon.
About a year later, the franchise grew its third head: the anime television show. It centred around Ash Ketchum (Satoshi in Japan) and his electrically charged, yellow Pokémon, Pikachu. The creators nailed Pikachu’s appearance and demeanour: adorable, brave, loyal and, most importantly, androgynous, appealing to boys and girls alike. The emotional bond between Ash and Pikachu resonated with audiences everywhere and became the show’s anchor.
The video game, the trading cards, and now the TV series all fed into one another. Domino theory. Kids would watch Ash encounter wild Pokémon on the show and instantly want to capture them for themselves on their Game Boys, or rip open packs and try to find that very card. In many ways, the machine had become self-fulfilling.
So why, as a 33-year-old, more than 20 years after first discovering it, have I been sucked back in? The answer: nostalgia, disposable income and the Internet.
Nostalgia is a powerful, invisible force – a yearning for what once was. Thinking back to myself as a bubbly little kid, a mop of brown hair atop my head, completely enraptured by Pokémon warms my heart. I’m reminded of a time when I didn’t have anything to worry about; I was doted on by my parents, and every experience was a thrill. Heck, even heading to the supermarket to buy groceries was an adventure. Not so much anymore…
Those precious memories are wrapped up in Pokémon, and Pokémon in turn has become inseparable from them.
One of the most frustrating things about the hobby as a youngen was that it relied on my parents’ wallets. Nowadays, I have my own money; I have agency. That out-of-reach feeling has faded as the products are attainable and there’s a contentment that comes with that.
And, finally, the last piece of the puzzle – the World Wide Web.
Back in the ’90s, Pokémon communities could only really grow face-to-face, and for the most part, collecting remained a private obsession. The Internet turned that on its head. Platforms like eBay and Whatnot have transformed collecting into live shopping marketplaces, where users can bid on cards in real time and watch people open Pokémon packs on their behalf. Sometimes I wonder what we’ve become. But hey, people tune in by the thousands. Add TikTok, Instagram and tapped-in Reddit communities to the mix, and you’ve got yourself a beast of a shared pastime.
One individual who has stoked the flames of this craze more than perhaps anyone is online personality and professional wrestler Logan Paul. This buff, blonde-haired bundle of energy has cleverly turned collecting into entertainment. In early 2021, he livestreamed himself opening a 1st Edition Base Set box, which was valued at roughly $1 million at the time. More than 200,000 people tuned in, and he was lucky enough to pull not one, but two holographic Charizards – the pinnacle of all Pokémon.
Even if you don’t know a thing about Pokémon cards, the dopamine surge of watching someone tear open a pack, flip through them one by one in search of what the collectors call “grails” is akin to watching a dealer drop the white ball on a roulette wheel. You know there’s a jackpot lurking somewhere in that pack; you just have to keep watching to see what it might be.
With a brain wired for viral content, Logan has turned the humble hobby of opening packs into reality television. Honestly, it’s hard to take your eyes off it. The event became the spark plug for the surge in Pokémon box breaks, grading, and the aforementioned livestreams on eBay, Whatnot and beyond.
But Paul didn’t stop there; he soon poured even more petrol on the fire, showing us all that these little pieces of cardboard could be a luxury asset – and I’m talking serious luxury. Later that year, he flew to Dubai and purchased the ultra-rare Pikachu Illustrator in the highest grade possible, a PSA 10, for a staggering US$5.75 million. Breaking the Guinness World Record for the most expensive Pokémon card in the process. There is only one in existence at this grade, which, unsurprisingly, skyrockets its value.
Staggeringly, less than five years later, he resold that very same card for almost US$16.5 million – once again knocking someone else out of the Guinness World Records. It became not only the most expensive Pokémon card ever sold, but the most expensive trading card of any kind, period. The auction was, of course, livestreamed and recorded, a mini gong being struck every time a new offer rolled in. It’s cringe but again, superbly hard to stop watching. His latest venture involves peeling the very first Pokémon cards (Pikachu and Jigglypuff) from Japanese CoroCoro comic books, then sending them off for grading in the hope of landing that most coveted of scores: a PSA 10. The books alone are worth upwards of $150,000.
While it’s undeniable that Logan has turbo-charged Pokémon, plenty of OG collectors accuse him of commodifying the hobby and turning it into a pure investment vehicle. And therein lies the interesting irony of this one-of-one personality: on one hand, he’s made Pokémon cool again for millions; on the other, he’s made it more expensive, competitive and less accessible for those who were here long before things reached fever pitch.
That is the great contradiction at the heart of Pokémon in 2026. What began with one kid’s innocent fascination with the natural world has become a multibillion-dollar cultural machine, fuelled by nostalgia, scarcity, speculation and an Internet that knows no end. We’ve taken something designed to make us explore, trade and play, and turned it into something we can grade, auction and store in a vault.
But beneath it all, Pokémon has endured for a much simpler reason. It provides a sense of meaning and provides a platform to indulge childlike curiosity. For Tajiri, Pokémon grew out of a desire to keep insects from disappearing from the landscape of his childhood. For me, Pokémon was a red binder stuffed with cards and the thrill of pulling a holographic something-or-other after a gleeful trip to my corner store. For millions of adults now, it’s a strange portal back to a time when the world felt bigger, more colourful and infinitely more exciting.
That’s why, at 33 years old, I’m back hunting for vintage Mews. I’m not really collecting cardboard. I’m collecting fragments of a person I used to be, little pieces of a childhood I thought I’d left behind.
And somewhere, buried in a storage unit or landfill, lies that red binder. Filled with weathered cardboard, yes, but also carrying the spirit of a wide-eyed kid who believed anything was possible.
Where it is…your guess is as good as mine. But perhaps that’s the point. Maybe growing up isn’t about leaving that kid behind. Maybe it’s about remembering the way back to him.