In February, a rectangle of cardboard with a cartoon mouse on it sold for $16,492,000. The Pikachu Illustrator is one of roughly 39 copies handed to winners of a Japanese illustration contest in the late 1990s, and Guinness World Records had an adjudicator on site to confirm the record after it went under the hammer at Goldin, diamond necklace thrown in. The seller, internet personality Logan Paul, had paid $5.275 million for it in 2021 and reportedly cleared better than eight million in profit after fees.

That is the most expensive trading card ever sold at auction, of any kind, sport included.

It is also a footnote.

What the hundred billion actually measures

Pokémon is the highest-grossing entertainment franchise on the planet, and the gap is faintly embarrassing for everyone else. Wikipedia’s running tally of the highest-grossing media franchises has it clear of Mickey Mouse, Winnie-the-Pooh, Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it gets there mostly on licensed merchandise rather than ticket sales. Writing up the annual Top Global Licensors whitepaper last year, Vice put cumulative Pokémon retail sales at $103.6 billion.

I spent a long time in an office where the word “revenue” meant something narrow and slightly boring, so allow me to spoil the fun, because that headline figure is doing something sneaky.

Retail sales means the total till value of everything sold with the brand stamped on it. Plush toys, pyjamas, breakfast cereal, phone cases, novelty slippers. Very little of that money reaches the brand owner, who typically takes a royalty on the wholesale price while manufacturers and retailers keep the rest. License Global, which ranks brand owners by exactly this metric, placed The Pokémon Company International at $12 billion for 2024, seventh in the world, behind Disney, Hasbro, NBCUniversal and a couple of brand-holding companies most people have never heard of.

What lands in the parent company’s accounts is smaller again. Industry analyst Serkan Toto, reading the filing in Japan’s official gazette, recorded net sales of ¥531 billion for the fiscal year ending February 2026, roughly $3.3 billion, with operating profit of ¥144 billion. Both records. Both a very long way short of the headline.

This is also why you will see wildly different totals quoted for the same franchise, from a hundred billion to nearly three hundred. There is no auditor for any of it. License Global states plainly on its rankings page that it invites brand owners to submit their own financials, along with their own methods for calculating them, through an open survey. Some of the entries carry an estimate flag. Nobody is lying, particularly, but a self-reported figure compiled from voluntary submissions is a weather forecast, not a thermometer reading.

So the number is real enough. It just measures how much cardboard, plastic and cotton has crossed a counter somewhere on Earth over thirty years, which is a different thing from a bank balance.

A boy who collected beetles in Machida

The other kids called him Dr Bug.

Satoshi Tajiri grew up in Machida, on the western edge of Tokyo, back when it still had rice paddies and rivers and forests. His biography records that he and his friends spent their childhoods trading insects, a hobby he has described in interviews since as the direct seed of the games he went on to make. He worked out that beetles slept under stones during the day, so while other children smeared honey on bark, he left a stone beneath a tree and collected them in the morning. He caught more than anyone. Then development arrived, the trees came down, and the insects stopped coming.

He followed them into the arcade. He wrote and stapled together a handwritten fanzine called Game Freak, selling tips for Donkey Kong and the rest, and one special issue shifted ten thousand copies at 300 yen each. By 18 he had a business. The more he learned about games, the worse he thought they were, and the conclusion he reached was that he should build his own. Kotaku’s history of the franchise traces how that fanzine became the studio.

Then Nintendo shipped the Game Boy with a link cable. Everybody else looked at that cable and saw a way to compete. Tajiri looked at it and saw two living creatures crawling back and forth along a wire, and he spent close to six years building the game that came out of the idea.

One caveat, because I think it matters. The insect-collecting origin comes almost entirely from Tajiri’s own interviews, retold thousands of times since. It is testimony rather than evidence, and origin stories have a way of getting tidier with each telling. I believe it. I would not put it in a peer-reviewed journal.

The night it nearly ended

On 16 December 1997, TV Tokyo aired episode 38 of the anime, “Dennō Senshi Porygon”. Twenty minutes in, Pikachu blows up some virtual missiles, and the animators rendered the blast as red and blue frames alternating at roughly 12 Hz for several seconds. Kotaku’s account of the incident records 685 viewers, 375 girls and 310 boys, taken to hospital by ambulance with symptoms ranging from nausea to full seizures. Japan called it Pokémon Shock. Nintendo’s share price fell.

Five years on, Nagoya researchers went back to find out what had happened to the children. NBC News covered the follow-up: of 91 patients traced in Aichi prefecture, 25 had experienced at least one further convulsion, divided almost evenly between those with an epilepsy diagnosis and those without. That is one study, one prefecture, ninety-odd people. It is a useful data point and nothing like a settled answer.

The series went dark for four months, came back with tamed lighting and an on-screen warning about sitting too close to the television, and Japanese broadcasters rewrote their animation guidelines. Porygon, which caused none of it, has been quietly kept away from the spotlight ever since.

Ten billion cards a year, still not enough

Eighty-five billion cards.

That is the lifetime production total published on The Pokémon Company’s own figures page as of the end of March 2026, in 16 languages across more than 90 countries. Roughly 10 billion of those were printed in the last twelve months alone. PokéBeach, which has been logging these figures since 2003, points out that the company printed 43 billion cards between 1996 and March 2022, then matched almost that entire first quarter-century in the four years since. Demand still outran it.

I have written before about fandoms behaving less like audiences and more like economies. This is that, at industrial scale.

The current surge started, oddly enough, on phones. Pokémon TCG Pocket arrived in October 2024 and, as Automaton reported, hit 100 million downloads inside four months and a billion dollars in player spending inside seven. Millions of people who had not held a physical card since school went looking for physical cards. Sets began vanishing on release day.

Then came the bots. CBC spoke to hobby shop staff watching online stock get swept the second it went live, with individual Pikachu cards from the Surging Sparks set listing north of a thousand Canadian dollars and fights breaking out in big-box aisles. The company’s printing arm is now putting up a 1.27 million square foot factory, per PokéBeach, though it will not be running at full capacity until late 2028. Cardboard, it turns out, has a supply chain.

The bit that isn’t cardboard

Pokémon Go turned ten in July, which will make a certain cohort of you feel physically unwell.

In March 2025, Variety reported that Niantic had agreed to sell its entire games division, Go included, to Scopely for $3.5 billion, with the games teams joining a workforce of more than 2,300 Scopely employees. Scopely sits under Savvy Games Group, which belongs to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. At the time of the sale the game still had twenty million people playing every week, almost nine years after launch.

The video games have not exactly stalled either. Total worldwide shipments of Pokémon software passed 515 million units by March 2026, up 26 million in twelve months, on the back of a single major release.

Why the number keeps climbing

Nostalgia is the lazy explanation, and it is only half of one, because every franchise on that list has nostalgia. Star Wars has more of it than anybody. What Star Wars also has is trilogies that conclude, reboots that betray, and a canon that fans can be locked out of by not having watched the right seven things first.

Pokémon has a fiscal calendar. New set in November, new set in January, new set after that, no finale to mourn and no barrier to entry more complicated than buying a packet. Tajiri built a game about a child walking out of a small town into tall grass to see what was living there, and the business built around it has spent thirty years never once suggesting that the walk should end.

Which is how you get a grown adult with a mortgage queueing outside a shop at eight in the morning, holding a spot for a version of himself who was never told the game was over.