Like most kids at the turn of the century, my two sisters and I were obsessed with Pokémon. We had the GameBoy games, the VHS tapes, binders bursting at the seams with trading cards— you name it. And when we finally got our first video game console in 2000 (after years of begging our mom), it was Pokémon-themed too: the Nintendo 64 Pikachu Edition.
Of course, that’s not what we called it. We called it our “Pikachu Nintendo.” It was among Nintendo’s first consoles themed around one of its IPs, and arguably the most elaborate at that. Given the Pokémania gripping the world at the time, the company could have slapped a Pokémon skin on any old Nintendo 64 and odds are the things still would have flown off the shelves. By 2000, just two years after Pokémon’s debut outside of Japan, the series had already made the cover of Time Magazine and earned a spot for its de facto mascot, Pikachu, in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, which it’s held to this day.
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