Pokémon Trading Card Game

About Pokémon Trading Card Game

Pokémon Trading Card Game (1998), Pokémon Card GB in Japan, is Hudson Soft and Creatures' Game Boy Color adaptation of the card game, with RPG-style travel between Club Masters and 226 cards, including exclusives found nowhere else.

Pokémon Trading Card Game in Depth

It simulates the tabletop collectible card game with role-playing elements like the main Pokémon series. The player, a young boy, travels the game world talking to non-player characters and challenging them to battles with 60-card decks. He must defeat eight Club Masters, each with a deck built around one of the game's elemental card types, and then four Grand Masters, whose defeat earns him the right to inherit four powerful Legendary Cards. At the start, he chooses one of three starter decks built around the three starting creatures of Pokémon Red and Blue, and each victory brings booster packs of random cards; up to four decks can be saved at once.

The 226 cards include those from the first three sets of the real game, plus exclusive cards unavailable elsewhere. Two real cards are missing, the base set's Electrode and Fossil's Ditto, because their effects were hard to translate into the game engine, and they are replaced by game-exclusive cards of the same Pokémon. Two players can battle or trade over the Game Boy's infrared port or Link Cable, and trading unlocks "Card Pop!", which gives cards otherwise inaccessible in the main game; the feature is absent from the 3DS version.

Making Pokémon Trading Card Game

Hudson Soft and Creatures co-developed the game, Creatures handling planning, game design and card design. Revealed in November 1998, it came out in Japan on 18 December, a month before the tabletop game debuted in English. Nintendo of America announced an English version in September 1999, provisionally called Pokémon Card, but delayed it to April 2000, which IGN attributed to the company focusing on Pokémon Stadium. It sold 607,193 copies in Japan by the end of 1999 and 1.51 million in its first year in North America, and averaged 81.25% on GameRankings. GameSpot called it "a faithful and amusing adaptation" but found that collecting "226 pieces of paper" did not satisfy like "catching 'em all", while IGN called it "a blast to play", and in 2009 said it was the spin-off it would most like Nintendo to bring back. A Japan-only sequel, Pokémon Card GB2: Great Rocket-Dan Sanjō!, followed in 2001 with 445 cards, the first Pokémon game published by The Pokémon Company.