What were the e-Reader Pokémon cards?

The e-Reader, Japan's Card e Reader, launched on December 1, 2001 (North America followed on September 16, 2002): a Game Boy Advance peripheral, built by Creatures, HAL Laboratory and Olympus, that reads Dot Code strips printed on cards, the long strip on a card carrying 2.2 kilobytes of data. Wizards redesigned the English card around it. The e-Card series, Expedition (September 15, 2002), Aquapolis and Skyridge, widened the left and bottom borders to carry the codes, and a swipe through the reader might show Pokédex data, play a minigame, spin a tune in the Melody Box, or unlock a hidden attack through the Construction system, an attack that was never legal in tournament play.

Japan ran the system deeper and longer: its P Promotional cards were e-Reader cards, and even McDonald's joined in with a Pokémon-e Minimum Pack. But the strangest e-Reader promos are the ones never meant to be kept. The Sample Set was a series of demonstration productions: three cards with one-off art shown by Tsunekazu Ishihara at the Game Boy Advance announcement in March 2001; ten near-final cards stamped "Sample," hole-punched and chained to kiosks at Nintendo Space World that August, where the event guidebook also carried a P Promo Celebi; and four-card sample packs at E3 2002 whose Pichu and Hoppip, English on the front, carry Japanese card backs. Most were supposed to be destroyed or retained; a few escaped, which is why they can be documented at all.

North America dropped the reader in 2004, and the English versions of later games quietly lost their e-Reader features. The cards remain: three expansions whose wide borders still ask to be swiped.