The design of rarity: what Pokémon has taught us in 30 years

On February 27, 1996, two Game Boy cartridges were released in Japan. No one — probably not even Nintendo — could have predicted that from that moment on the global collectibles market would undergo an irreversible transformation. Thirty years later, Pokémon is no longer just a video game franchise: it is an autonomous economic system and a cultural code shared across generations. The story begins with Satoshi Tajiri, a Tokyo native who grew up obsessed with insects. The core idea was structurally simple: capture creatures, classify them, trade them. It was a game built on obsessive completion, on the collecting impulse that behavioral psychology recognizes as one of the most powerful drivers of human consumption. Tajiri worked on the project for six years before it came to light, with support from game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. The result was Pocket Monsters Red and Green, released for hardware already considered obsolete but capable of selling millions of copies within months.

When, in October of that same year, Media Factory introduced the collectible card game, once again no one imagined that the format would eventually surpass the video game it derived from in economic relevance. The first set contained 102 cards, illustrated by Ken Sugimori, Mitsuhiro Arita, and Keiji Kinebuchi. 

The design was sober and functional, built around a system of numerical values readable even by a six-year-old. Yet the visual language introduced something distinctly different from earlier Western card games: an aesthetic sensibility drawn from Japanese animation, where creatures blended the kawaii register with the monstrous, the cute with the uncanny.

In 1999 the cards arrived in North America through Wizards of the Coast, the same publisher that had launched Magic: The Gathering in 1993 for a more adult, specialist audience. Pokémon radically lowered the barrier to entry: simplified rules, characters already familiar through video games and the animated series, and a rarity system that turned every pack opening into a moment of emotional suspense. The blind-box model — now ubiquitous in the collectibles industry — found in Pokémon one of its most successful laboratories.

Elementary schools across much of the world became informal marketplaces. Schoolyards hosted negotiations that replicated, at a reduced scale, the logic of commodity exchanges. A holographic Charizard was worth more than a school lunch. Cards were not used only for play: they were displayed, stored in protective sleeves, arranged in binders. They were artifacts to preserve, not objects to consume.

What Pokémon introduced into the collectibles market was a structured and transparent grammar of value. Each card displayed its own rarity through recognizable symbols: circle, diamond, star.

More than a simple card game, Pokémon built a portable micro-economic infrastructure. Every card functions as an interface: it combines image, numerical data, rarity symbol, and condition into a single graphic object. Within a few square centimeters, hierarchy, desire, and market logic converge. It is systemic design that translates abstract concepts — scarcity, prestige, valuation — into a language immediately legible even to a child. In this sense, the Pokémon card may be one of the most sophisticated pedagogical devices of the past thirty years.

It is no surprise that contemporary artists have treated Pokémon as archaeological material. Daniel Arsham has transformed Pikachu and collectible cards into ruins of an imagined future, crystallizing them into sculptures that emphasize their relic-like dimension. It marks the passage from ludic object to cultural artifact: from playing card to specimen. Thirty years on, that system has generated a secondary market of extraordinary scale. The most expensive card ever sold at auction is the Pikachu Illustrator, which fetched $900,000 in 2022. Only about forty copies were produced, distributed as prizes in a 1998 illustration contest. Its value derives not from gameplay function but from documented scarcity and historical significance within a narrative shared by millions.

The phenomenon of scalpers hoarding sealed packs to resell them at inflated prices is not a recent deviation but the structural effect of a model designed around scarcity. The Pokémon Company manages this balance by alternating reprints and limited print runs, producing cards intended exclusively for the Japanese market that become cult objects elsewhere. The asymmetrical internationalization of supply is itself a tool for regulating collective desire.

Today Pokémon is one of the most profitable entertainment assets in the world, with total revenues exceeding $100 billion since its debut. Yet the economic figure tells only part of the story.

Pokémon’s legacy in the trading card market is measurable in concrete terms. Before 1996, the format of cards with variable commercial value existed but was confined to specific niches: sports cards in the United States, Magic within specialist circles. Pokémon brought organized collecting to a global mass audience, normalized the idea that a paper object could be worth significant sums, and built a community with autonomous evaluative skills and a shared vocabulary.

Celebrations for the thirtieth anniversary will begin on February 27, 2026, the date that coincides with the original release of Red and Green. Thirty years tell the story of a system. Anyone playing with Pikachu today inherits not only an imaginary world but a grammar of value learned long before it can be named. In an era in which any object can become an asset, Pokémon has not simply accompanied the collectibles market — it has designed it.