This story was originally published in Vol. 34, Issue 2 (October 2023)
Pokémon, short for Pocket Monsters, is a game franchise that originated in Japan with the 1996 dual release of Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green for the Nintendo Game Boy, a handheld gaming console. In the world of Pokémon, Pokémon are fictional, animal-adjacent creatures with various elemental powers that coexist with humans. The franchise revolves around humans capturing, raising and training Pokémon to battle with other trainers and their Pokémon. Since its launch, Pokémon has evolved into a global phenomenon including a trading card game, an animated series, a mobile phone game, and more. The franchise’s popularity is exemplified at WSU Vancouver, as over 70 students signed up within two weeks of the Pokémon Club’s founding.
Junior biology major Sunny Ly is the president and founder of WSU Vancouver’s Pokémon Club. Ly said that after bringing up the idea to his peers last spring, they insisted on him making it a reality until he formally registered the club during the first week of the fall 2023 semester. Ly and many of the club’s members discovered Pokémon during their formative years, and their passion for the franchise has endured since.
“I ran into Pokémon when I was five or six,” said Ly. “After kindergarten my dad would pick me up from preschool, and then we would go to this convenience store and buy knockoff Pokémon cards, like a box of 30 cards for one dollar. That’s when I really got into it.”
Ly founded the club with the aim of providing enthusiasts of Pokémon an avenue for enjoyable, community-based activities. Realizing the club needed a logo, Ly sketched it in one attempt using his non-dominant hand. Junior DTC major Jorge Luis-Contreras, the club’s vice president, said that the logo was crafted to embody a playful and inviting atmosphere.
“We were thinking about a logo, and I told [Ly] to draw with his non-dominant hand, which is his right hand,” said Luis-Contreras. “It just took one take and then we just went with it… it just gives the vibe of the environment. We’re not that serious, we’re just here to have fun and hang out.”
During the club’s first meeting, the founding members laid the groundwork for their future on campus. Among their plans are hosting Pokémon Go community days, providing students the opportunity to meet up and play the mobile game together on campus. Additionally, the club will organize trading events, allowing students to exchange Pokémon from both the trading card game and various video games across the franchise. Ly also shared their plans to organize a Pokémon trading card game tournament, where participants will open sealed packages of cards to construct decks and compete in battles using their newly obtained Pokémon cards.
“I’m definitely looking forward to hosting our sealed tournaments, as well as an event that we have planned, which is teaching our members how to play the Pokémon card game so that the progression from teaching our members into the tournament will hopefully be seamless,” said Ly.
The club also held a Who’s that Pokémon? Kahoot quiz, where students competed to guess the names of various Pokémon from the series. Madison Bessas, a sophomore marketing major, took first place, winning a tin collection of Pokémon cards. Bessas brought her own Pokémon card collection to the event, estimating it to consist of anywhere between 800 and 1,000 cards. Bessas said that while Pokémon has been a part of her life since childhood, it was not until approximately last year that she began actively collecting cards.
“My first game was Pokémon Black on the [Nintendo DS],” said Bessas. “I watched the original anime with my sister, we would watch the bootleg versions on YouTube downstairs on the family computer. Me and my sister were super into the original anime, and that’s just kind of where it started.”
Han Nguyen, a sophomore majoring in strategic communications, brought her own binder of carefully organized Pokémon cards arranged mainly by energy type, the element assigned to every Pokémon. Nguyen began collecting cards when she was six, and believes her collection to easily exceed 1,000 total cards. Included in her collection is her first card, a Japanese copy of Celebi, a mythical time-traveling Pokémon.
“My dad got it from a garage sale for free because the kid was trying to get rid of his cards,” said Nguyen. “I guess depending on the condition of [the card], it can range anywhere from $20 to $60 [in value].”
Junior human development major Joseph Reyes-Hernandez, the Pokémon Club’s social media assistant, expressed that the club’s explosive popularity on campus can be attributed to a deep rooted nostalgia from those who grew up with Pokémon.
“I think a part of it has to do with the sort of hidden admiration for Pokémon that many people have… there’s a lot of people that have had interactions with Pokémon at some point in their life, and others that continue to have that, so I think it’s a combination of both of those, we just sort of struck gold,” said Reyes-Hernandez.
Norman is a senior majoring in Integrated Strategic Communications and Digital Technology & Culture.