Gotta Catch 'Em All: Inside the Pokémon Card Craze of 1999

By the start of 1999, American kids already knew the names. Pokémon Red and Blue had arrived on the Game Boy in the fall of 1998, and the animated series had begun airing on US television that September. Pikachu was on lunchboxes before most parents could pronounce it. Then, in January 1999, Wizards of the Coast released the English-language Pokémon Trading Card Game, and the franchise gained something that a video game or a cartoon could not offer: a physical object you could hold, trade, lose, argue over and carry to school in your pocket.

A game from Japan, a publisher from Seattle

The card game was not new. It had launched in Japan in 1996, published by Media Factory, and had already proved popular there. Wizards of the Coast, the Seattle-area company best known for Magic: The Gathering, secured the rights to produce the game in English and brought it to American stores as the set now called Base Set.

Wizards knew collectible card games better than almost anyone, and the Pokémon product used the familiar structure: starter decks for learning to play and booster packs of randomized cards, with a small number of rare holographic cards in the mix. The holo cards, with their shimmering artwork of Charizard, Blastoise, Venusaur and others, became the objects of desire. Base Set was quickly followed by Jungle and Fossil later in 1999, and each new set added more to chase.

The shelves ran dry

What happened next surprised retailers. Demand outran supply for much of 1999, and many stores struggled to keep booster packs in stock. Newspapers and TV news ran stories about parents hunting for packs and shops limiting purchases. For kids, the scarcity only added to the thrill. A fresh pack was an event, and pulling a holo was the kind of moment that got retold across the lunch table for days.

The craze was not confined to cards. Pokémon: The First Movie opened in American theaters in November 1999, and moviegoers received promotional cards with their tickets, another sign of how central the cards had become to the whole phenomenon. By then Wizards of the Coast itself had been acquired by Hasbro, a deal announced in 1999, as the toy giant moved to own a piece of the boom.

A card game that had already been a hit in Japan became, within months of its English release, something American schools felt they had to regulate.

Trouble at recess

For children, the real marketplace was the schoolyard. Trading was the heart of the hobby, and kids developed their own rough economy of which cards were worth what. That economy was not always fair. Older kids sometimes talked younger ones out of their best cards, trades were regretted and disputed, and cards went missing from backpacks.

Schools noticed. During 1999, many schools across the United States banned Pokémon cards from their grounds or from class time, citing distraction, arguments, trading disputes and theft. The bans were widely reported at the time and became part of the lore of the era; for a lot of kids, having the cards confiscated was a rite of passage. There were also concerns in the press about whether the randomized packs encouraged gambling-like behavior, a debate that has followed collectible card games in various forms ever since.

The marks of a first printing

Collectors now pay close attention to details that most children in 1999 never noticed. The earliest English Base Set cards were printed with a small "1st Edition" stamp on the left side below the artwork, marking the first print run. Later Base Set printings dropped the stamp and were sold as the unlimited edition.

Within those early printings there is another distinction. Early cards lacked the drop shadow along the right edge of the artwork frame that appeared on later print runs, and collectors call these "Shadowless." First Edition Base Set cards share this shadowless look, while unlimited cards come in both shadowless and shadowed versions. There are other small differences between print runs as well, such as changes to the copyright text, and dedicated collectors have catalogued them closely. At the time, almost no one cared; the stamp and shadow only became famous years later.

The generation that grew up

The kids of 1999 grew up, and many of them never entirely let go. Pokémon itself kept going, with new games, shows and card sets year after year, so the franchise never faded into a pure memory. But the first cards occupied a special place, tied up with Game Boys, Saturday cartoons and the feel of the schoolyard.

That nostalgia helped drive several later surges of interest. The franchise's 20th anniversary in 2016 and the release of Pokémon Go that summer brought many lapsed fans back. A much larger wave arrived around 2020 and 2021, when adults stuck at home rediscovered their childhood collections, prominent personalities publicized card openings and graded cards, and demand for both vintage and new cards jumped. Grading companies faced large backlogs, and some big retailers temporarily changed how they sold trading cards after crowds and disputes at stores, echoes of the scarcity that had marked the original craze two decades earlier.

What it means for collectors

The 1999 boom produced an enormous number of cards, so plenty of Base Set, Jungle and Fossil cards survive. What is scarcer is condition. These cards were played with, traded, rubber-banded and stuffed in pockets, which is why well-preserved examples and professionally graded copies attract so much attention. Collectors look closely at centering, corners, edges and surface wear, especially on the holographic cards, which scratch easily.

Knowing the print markers matters just as much. The 1st Edition stamp, the presence or absence of the shadow on the art frame, and the other small print-run variations are what separate one Base Set card from another that looks identical at a glance. The Japanese originals that came first form a separate collecting world with their own differences in cards and printing. For many collectors, though, the English cards of 1999 are the ones that matter most, because they are the ones they held in their own hands as kids.