Which came first, the Pokémon games, the cards or the anime?

Pocket Monsters Red and Green launched in Japan on February 27, 1996. The franchise people now picture as a card game or a cartoon began as two Game Boy cartridges and a link cable, the trading system Satoshi Tajiri had imagined years earlier.

The trading card game came second. Media Factory published the first Japanese Pokémon cards in October 1996, eight months after the games, building a paper hobby on creatures players had already spent the year catching and trading electronically. The cards' own history, Japanese backs and all, has its own shelf in the Library.

The anime came last of the three. The television series premiered in Japan on April 1, 1997, more than a year after the games, with Ash's story deliberately following the shape of a player's journey through Kanto. By the time the anime reached the West it would reshape the games in return: Pokémon Yellow, the anime edition, is a later shelf in this cluster.

The order matters to collectors because it explains the objects. The earliest Pokémon merchandise documents a video game, not a show: the 1996 boxes, cards and guides all orbit two Game Boy cartridges.