Lore — how the Pokémon Trading Card Game began

Before the cards: Creatures and the Game Boy games

The card game was made by Creatures Inc., a Tokyo company established on 8 November 1995 with Tsunekazu Ishihara as its head. Creatures grew out of the staff of an earlier studio, Ape Inc., and today it is one of the three owners of The Pokémon Company, alongside Nintendo and Game Freak.

The source material was Game Freak's pair of Game Boy games, Pocket Monsters Red and Green, released in Japan on 27 February 1996. The card game was built from those games: the same creatures, the same types, the same idea of collecting and trading. Bandai had already released a set of Pokémon Carddass collectible cards in September 1996, but those were not a game in the same sense.

20 October 1996: the first packs in Japan

The Pokémon Card Game went on sale in Japan on 20 October 1996, published by Media Factory. The first release was a starter deck and an expansion pack of 102 cards, the same 102 that English players later met as Base Set.

Reference works credit the game's design to Tsunekazu Ishihara, Kouichi Ooyama and Takumi Akabane. The first cards were illustrated by a small group of artists, chief among them Ken Sugimori, Mitsuhiro Arita and Keiji Kinebuchi.

Organized play started early. The first official Pokémon TCG tournament was held on 14 and 15 June 1997 at Makuhari Messe, near Tokyo.

1. 8 Nov 1995Creatures Inc. is established in Tokyo.
2. 27 Feb 1996Pocket Monsters Red and Green launch on Game Boy in Japan.
3. 20 Oct 1996The Pokémon Card Game launches in Japan, published by Media Factory.
4. 14–15 Jun 1997The first official tournament is held at Makuhari Messe.
5. Dec 1998A Game Boy Color version of the card game is released in Japan, developed by Hudson Soft and Creatures. It reached North America and Europe in 2000.

Pikachu Illustrator, the rarest card

In 1997 and 1998 the magazine CoroCoro Comic ran illustration contests for the card game. The prize was a promotional card, Pikachu Illustrator, drawn by Atsuko Nishida, who is publicly credited with designing Pikachu. Only 41 copies are reported to have been awarded.

Because so few exist, graded copies have become the most expensive Pokémon cards ever sold, with public auction results in the millions of US dollars in the 2020s. The card is a prize, not part of any set, so it does not appear in this site's set pages.

1999–2003: Wizards of the Coast brings the game west

Wizards of the Coast, the company behind Magic: The Gathering, licensed the game for English-speaking markets. Its English Base Set went on sale on 9 January 1999. Wizards reported selling 400,000 packs in under six weeks. Later that year Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast, in September 1999.

Across its run Wizards released fifteen English expansions and reprint sets, from Base Set to Skyridge, plus a line of Black Star promos. These sets brought in Dark Pokémon (Team Rocket), Owner's Pokémon (the Gym sets), the Darkness and Metal types and Shining Pokémon (the Neo sets), and cards that could be scanned with the Game Boy Advance e-Reader (the e-Card sets).

• Base Set 9 January 1999 · the 102 cards that started it in English
• Jungle 16 June 1999 · the first English expansion
• Team Rocket 24 April 2000 · introduced Dark Pokémon
• Gym Heroes 14 August 2000 · Owner's Pokémon, such as Brock's and Misty's
• Neo Genesis 16 December 2000 · the Gold and Silver generation arrives
• Expedition Base Set 15 September 2002 · the first e-Reader set
• Skyridge 12 May 2003 · the last Wizards set

2003 onward: The Pokémon Company takes over

The Pokémon Company was founded in Tokyo on 23 April 1998 under the name Pokémon Center Co., Ltd., and took its current name in October 2000. In Japan it replaced Media Factory as the card game's publisher in 2000. In 2001 Nintendo set up Pokémon USA to bring licensing back in house, and in mid-2003 the English card game moved from Wizards of the Coast to the Pokémon side. Wizards later sued over the change, and the case was settled out of court.

The first English set of the new era was EX Ruby & Sapphire, released in July 2003. In 2009 Pokémon USA and Pokémon UK merged into The Pokémon Company International, which publishes the English cards today.

The eras of the game, told through its special cards

Each era of the card game has a signature kind of powerful Pokémon card. Following them is the quickest way to place any card in time. Dates below are the English release dates of the set where each mechanic first appeared.

1. Sep 2001Neo Revelation · Shining Pokémon
2. Jul 2003EX Ruby & Sapphire · Pokémon-ex
3. Nov 2004EX Team Rocket Returns · Pokémon ☆ (Star)
4. May 2007Diamond & Pearl · Pokémon LV.X
5. Feb 2010HeartGold & SoulSilver · Pokémon Prime and LEGEND
6. Apr 2011Black & White · Poké-Powers and Poké-Bodies become Abilities
7. Feb 2012Next Destinies · Pokémon-EX
8. Feb 2014XY · Mega Evolution (M Pokémon-EX)
9. Nov 2015BREAKthrough · Pokémon BREAK
10. Feb 2017Sun & Moon · Pokémon-GX
11. Feb 2018Ultra Prism · Prism Star cards
12. Feb 2019Team Up · TAG TEAM Pokémon-GX
13. Feb 2020Sword & Shield · Pokémon V and VMAX
14. Feb 2022Brilliant Stars · Pokémon VSTAR
15. May 2022Astral Radiance · Radiant Pokémon
16. Mar 2023Scarlet & Violet · Pokémon ex and Tera Pokémon ex
17. Sep 2025Mega Evolution · Mega Evolution Pokémon ex

The artists

Every Pokémon card credits its illustrator, and this site shows that credit on every card. The original 102-card Base Set was drawn by just four people: Ken Sugimori (44 cards), Keiji Kinebuchi (38), Mitsuhiro Arita (19) and Tomoaki Imakuni (1). Arita drew the Base Set Charizard and Pikachu; Sugimori drew Blastoise and Mewtwo.

Hundreds of artists have contributed since. Recent sets lean on full-art and illustration-rare cards, where an artist paints a whole scene around the Pokémon, and those cards have become some of the most collected of the modern era.

• Ken SugimoriOriginal creature designs · first-set illustrator

  Game Freak's art director, who drew the official artwork for the first 151 Pokémon and the largest share of the cards in the first set.

• Mitsuhiro AritaIllustrator since the first set

  Painted the Base Set Charizard, Pikachu and Venusaur, and has illustrated cards in nearly every series since, from Neo to Mega Evolution.

• Keiji KinebuchiIllustrator of the first set

  Drew 38 of the 102 Base Set cards, much of the common and uncommon line-up.

• Tomoaki ImakuniIllustrator

  Credited with one card in Base Set, the smallest share of the four original artists.

• Atsuko NishidaIllustrator

  Publicly credited with the design of Pikachu, and the artist of the Pikachu Illustrator prize card.

The game on screens

The card game has had a digital life almost from the start: the Game Boy Color game in 1998 (Japan) and 2000 (abroad), the online Pokémon TCG Online from 24 March 2011, its replacement Pokémon TCG Live (global beta from 15 November 2022), and the collecting-focused Pokémon TCG Pocket, released worldwide on 30 October 2024. This site covers the physical cards only.

The game today

Interest in the cards surged in the early 2020s, with record auction prices and new sets selling out in stores. The Pokémon Company reports that more than 85 billion cards had been produced by the end of March 2026. The game is still built the same way it was in 1996: new sets every few months, drawn from the latest video games, with a World Championships for players every year.

• Celebrations 8 October 2021 · the 25th-anniversary set, with reprints of famous cards
• 151 22 September 2023 · a return to the original 151 Pokémon
• Prismatic Evolutions 17 January 2025 · a heavily collected special set

How the Pokémon world came to be

Pocket Monsters began as a pair of Game Boy games, Red and Green, released in Japan on 27 February 1996. Game Freak, a small studio in Tokyo, had spent about six years building them. The idea was a world of creatures you could catch, raise, and trade with a friend through the Game Boy link cable.

The name most of the world learned, Pokémon, is a shortening of Pocket Monsters. Japan kept the longer name. A revised edition, Blue, followed for Japanese players. Yellow, in 1998, took a cue from the anime and made Pikachu the partner who walks beside you.

The same year the games launched, a trading card game began in Japan. The animated series followed in April 1997. Cards and the television road story were parallel projects, not the game rewritten as a show. Together they turned a cartridge about collecting into a franchise.

Primary creators

The games have a public credit roll. These are the people most often named when the early work is discussed. Dates and roles below are the ones widely published in interviews, company histories, and reference works. This page does not invent quotations.

• Satoshi TajiriFounder of Game Freak · director of Red and Green

  Born 28 August 1965 in Setagaya, Tokyo. As a child in Machida he collected insects, then watched those fields shrink as the city grew. The games were his way of giving that collecting back: creatures small enough to carry, and a cable so two Game Boys could trade. Game Freak began as a self-published games magazine around 1983 and became a company in 1989. He directed Pocket Monsters Red and Green.

• Ken SugimoriArt director · founding member

  Born 27 January 1966 in Tokyo. He drew the original 151 in the clean, slightly strange style that became the official look, and he kept defining how Pokémon are drawn for years after. Early sketches of his appear in official anniversary features and art books. This site does not reproduce those pages.

• Junichi MasudaComposer of Red and Green · later director

  Born 12 January 1968 in Yokohama. He wrote the music for Red and Green on the Game Boy’s limited sound chip, then directed later mainline pairs, including Ruby and Sapphire and Diamond and Pearl.

• Atsuko NishidaIllustrator

  An illustrator at Game Freak who, with Sugimori, designed many of the first creatures. She is publicly credited with the design of Pikachu.

• Shigeki MorimotoProgrammer on Red and Green

  He is publicly credited with adding Mew late in development: a creature that was not in the early plans, and that players were meant to find as a surprise.

• Tsunekazu IshiharaCard-game producer · president of The Pokémon Company

  Born 27 November 1957. At Creatures he produced the trading card game, then later led The Pokémon Company. He took the world Tajiri and Sugimori had built and put it on cards, and helped hold the games, the cards, and the animation together.

• Shigeru MiyamotoThe door at Nintendo

  Miyamoto is publicly credited with supporting the Pocket Monsters pitch inside Nintendo. His part was the door, not the design of the creatures.

• Hiroshi YamauchiPresident of Nintendo, 1949–2002

  Yamauchi, then president of Nintendo, is credited with approving the project. His part was the same door: a yes from the publisher, not a creature design.

Behind the scenes

Game Freak started as friends writing about games, then making them. Pocket Monsters was not a quick licensed product. Public accounts put development at about six years, inside the limits of a Game Boy cartridge: tiny sprites, a few sound channels, and not enough space for every creature on one card.

Two versions were the answer they shipped. Red and Green share a map and split the roster, so the link cable is how you complete a collection. That limit became the social idea of the series. A friend has the one you cannot catch.

The creatures grew out of Tajiri’s insect collecting and out of capsule toys — small figures in plastic balls. The project was called Capsule Monsters before it was Pocket Monsters. A capsule you keep in a pocket, plus a cable between two machines, is the public origin of the Poké Ball and of trading.

Sugimori’s drawings had to survive a four-color handheld and still read as an animal with a personality. Nishida’s Pikachu is the famous case: a small electric mouse that the later anime would put at the center. Morimoto’s Mew showed the team could still hide something in the last bytes of the ROM.

The card game and the anime did not wait for the games to finish their life abroad. Creatures produced the TCG in Japan in 1996. The television series began in April 1997. International releases, under the shorter name Pokémon, came after, with Red and Blue.

Early work

Before Red and Green there was Capsule Monsters: a design in which creatures lived in capsules and moved between players. Bulbapedia’s Capsule Monsters page and its Red and Green beta notes collect what has been published about that stage — names, system ideas, and which monsters changed before release.

Sugimori’s Capsule Monsters sheets, the prototype monster drawings, and the art-book pages are still under copyright. They appear in official anniversary features and exhibition catalogs, but not under a license LearnPokémon can copy, so they are not scanned here. The pictures below are public photographs that are free to host: capsule-toy machines of the kind that early name pointed at, and a 2022 view of a fossil-Pokémon exhibition at Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science. That exhibition places finished designs beside real fossils. It is not a development sketch.

• Satoshi Tajiri — Wikipedia Public biography of Game Freak’s founder and the director of Red and Green.
• Ken Sugimori — Wikipedia Art director of the original games, and the illustrator of the first 151.
• Junichi Masuda — Wikipedia Composer of Red and Green, and later a director of mainline pairs.
• Tsunekazu Ishihara — Wikipedia Producer of the card game, and president of The Pokémon Company.
• Capsule Monsters — Bulbapedia Published notes on the pre-release concept, before the name Pocket Monsters.
• Red and Green beta — Bulbapedia What changed between early builds and the games released in 1996.
• Game Freak The studio’s own site.