Word: game
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...answer may lie in the origins of the phenomenon. Despite the publicity generated by the trading cards, the heart of Pokemon is a handheld game. Start by picking up a palm-size Nintendo Game Boy, insert the proper cartridge and switch it on. Soon, a creature with a lightning-bolt tail bounces through an animated sequence, pops a cute grin and yelps, "Pikachu!" You have met the most popular of the Pokemon, a creature--part cherub and part thunder god--that is the most famous mouse since Mickey and Mighty...
...goal is to travel the world collecting one of every Pokemon species. To acquire that collection, you need Pokemon to subdue Pokemon (they are then stored in handy containers called Pokeballs, hence the etymology of Pokemon, short for Pocket Monsters). The battles are mediated by the electronics of the Game Boy. But don't worry: Pokemon do not die. When they lose battles, they faint. And if that happens to your Pokemon, you can take it to the local Pokemon Center, a high-tech spa where it can be restored to "fighting...
There are 151 Pokemon scattered among three existing versions of the game: Pokemon Red, Pokemon Blue and Pokeman Yellow. You have to trade between versions (via a cable linking Game Boys) to complete the collection. Thus the quest for all Pokemon grows as the product line expands with new species. Pokemon Gold and Pokemon Silver will become available in the U.S. next year, with the promise of 260 species...
...pond and forest. In a nation of ultraconformists, he was a misfit who didn't even dream of college. His father tried to get him a job as an electrical-utility repairman. He refused. No one expected him to go very far, even when he came up with the game after six trying years. But it is Tajiri's obsessions, more dysfunctional than Disneyesque, that are at the core of the Pokemon phenomenon. His monsters are a child's predilections. As the late, controversial child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote, "The monster a child knows best and is most concerned with...
Rolled together with his other passion: video games. Tajiri was raised on Space Invaders in the early days of the video-game revolution. He never went to college but studied electronics at a two-year technical school. He spent much of his time at arcades, perhaps the very ones that grew over the ponds of his childhood. "It was as sinful as shoplifting," Tajiri says. "My parents cried that I had become a delinquent." He was such a fanatic that one arcade gave him a Space Invaders machine to take home...