Nintendo Power · Issue 101, October 1997 · Pokémon Red and Blue
Nintendo Power's first substantial North American coverage of Pokémon — arriving ahead of the September 1998 launch — introduced millions of American players to a phenomenon that had already reshaped Japanese gaming culture and was about to do the same globally.
Pokémon Red and Green had launched in Japan in February 1996 and spent two years gradually consuming Japanese youth culture before Nintendo of America decided to localize them. By the time Nintendo Power began significant coverage in late 1997 and through 1998, Pokémon had already proven itself in Japan — the anime was in production, the trading card game was an established phenomenon, and Pokémon had sold millions of Game Boy cartridges without a single advertisement aimed at Western markets. Nintendo Power's coverage was the primary source of information for American players who had heard the word "Pokémon" through import channels and Japanese gaming press and wanted to understand what was coming. The magazine's enthusiasm, combined with Nintendo's unprecedented marketing push and the simultaneous launch of the anime, produced a cultural event that overwhelmed every existing framework for understanding a game's success.
Introducing North American gaming audiences to the most commercially successful game franchise in history before its Western launch and helping build the anticipation that made its arrival a cultural phenomenon.
Nintendo Power's challenge in covering Pokémon for Western audiences was one of translation in the broadest sense. The game's mechanics — 151 monsters to collect, type advantages and disadvantages, the trading and battling social layer — were straightforward to describe but difficult to convey in emotional terms to readers who had no cultural context for what Pokémon meant in Japan. The magazine's solution was to lean on the collecting and completion instincts it knew its readers had, framing Pokémon as the ultimate expression of the impulse to master and complete that drives gaming engagement.
The coverage also had to navigate the unusual situation of previewing a game that was already two years old in Japan. Import players existed, and some Nintendo Power readers would already have played Japanese versions via fan translations. The magazine addressed this carefully, focusing on the localization quality, the trading card game synergy, and the anime launch as reasons why the Western release would be a distinct and worthy event even for players already familiar with the content.
Pull-out Pokédex sheets in the months before launch became genuine collecting artifacts. Nintendo Power readers cut them out, laminated them, and brought them to school as reference materials for a game that wasn't yet released — a remarkable testament to how effectively the magazine had built anticipation for something most of its readers had never played.
Nintendo's Western Pokémon strategy was unprecedented in its multimedia coordination. The game, the anime, the trading card game, and the merchandise all launched in coordinated waves designed to reinforce each other — a child who discovered Pokémon through the cartoon could buy the game; a player who encountered a card on the schoolyard could watch the anime to learn more about the character. Nintendo Power was one node in this media web, providing the gaming-specific depth that television advertising and cartoon episodes could not deliver.
The success of this coordinated launch has been so thoroughly absorbed into gaming industry practice that it is easy to forget how unusual it was in 1998. Most games launched with print advertising and perhaps a television commercial; Pokémon launched with a fully integrated media franchise. The scale of the resulting phenomenon — Red and Blue selling nearly ten million copies in North America alone in their first year — vindicated the strategy completely and established a template that Nintendo and other publishers would attempt to replicate for years. Nintendo Power's role in documenting and building anticipation for the game made it part of gaming history in a way that a simple cover story rarely achieves.