Thirty years ago this year, two Game Boy cartridges went on sale in Japan and quietly became the most lucrative entertainment property ever made. Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green launched on February 27, 1996, according to Men’s Journal’s anniversary retrospective, and the franchise has since pulled in $147 billion, more than any other media property in history, according to Guinness World Records‘ own count. Three decades later, The Pokémon Company is marking the milestone with a Super Bowl commercial, a new trading card set, and a McDonald’s collaboration that had collectors lining up in Japan. The party is real, but so is the staying power behind it.

Two Cartridges, One Overnight Obsession

Pokémon Red and Green weren’t identical twins. The Japanese originals split the roster by version, with Red leaning into Fire-type encounters and Green built around Grass and Poison Pokémon, according to Men’s Journal. Trainers had to trade with a friend’s Game Boy over a physical link cable just to fill out the Pokédex, a mechanic that turned a solo game into a playground negotiation. It worked almost immediately. When the games reached the West as Pokémon Red and Blue, the pair became the best-selling video game of all time by unit count, at more than 31.38 million copies, a record Pokémon still holds according to Guinness. Zoom out to the whole role-playing series and the number gets sillier: 485.3 million games sold, per Guinness’s most recent tally. By 1999, a Game Boy cartridge had already landed on the cover of TIME magazine, the first video game to do so.

The Card Game Gets Its Own Party

The trading card side of the business is getting an anniversary set to match. Pokémon TCG: 30th Celebration launches worldwide on September 16, 2026, the first time a mainline expansion has released simultaneously everywhere on Earth, according to GameSpace’s breakdown of the set. Every card in it is foil, down to the basic Energy cards, and each booster pack guarantees a Pikachu pulled from a pool of 30 different illustrations. The set also revives 30 cards from across the franchise’s history, including the original Base Set Charizard and Base Set Pikachu, reprinted with a special “30” stamp, though these are collector pieces rather than tournament-legal cards. It’s a formula the company has leaned on before for milestone years, and it works because the nostalgia and the collecting hobby were never really separate things to begin with.

A Super Bowl Ad With Lady Gaga Singing to a Jigglypuff

The Pokémon Company kicked the anniversary year off during Super Bowl LX on February 8, 2026, with a commercial called “What’s Your Favorite?” that paired celebrities with animated versions of their favorite Pokémon, according to Variety. Lady Gaga performed a duet with an animated Jigglypuff, and the rest of the cast, including Trevor Noah, Jisoo, Formula One driver Charles Leclerc, soccer star Lamine Yamal, rapper Young Miko, and actress Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, each got matched with a character of their own. It was the opening beat of a yearlong 30th-anniversary campaign rather than a one-off spot, according to ICv2. In an official statement tied to the spot, Pokémon Company International president Kenji Okubo said “the passion of our fans is what has allowed Pokémon to have a lasting impact on pop culture around the world and across generations,” according to the company’s press release.

Happy Meals, Sneakers, and a Very Long Victory Lap

McDonald’s Japan brought back its own piece of Pokémon nostalgia on August 7, 2026, rolling out a 30th-anniversary Happy Meal collection with 12 toy designs across two release waves, including Pikachu and Eevee “Monster Ball Rollers” and a Snorlax card-case keychain, according to CBR. It’s one entry on a much longer list. Over the course of 2026, the company has run collaborations with G-Shock and Adidas, released merchandise through its own Pokémon Center storefront, brought Nintendo Switch remakes of FireRed and LeafGreen to a new generation of players, and partnered with virtual pop star Hatsune Miku on a music series, according to Collider. No single tie-in is the point. The point is that there’s been one, in some form, nearly every month of the anniversary year.

What’s actually remarkable isn’t that Pokémon turned 30 — plenty of 1996 properties did. It’s that the company spent an entire year proving the original formula still works almost exactly like it did on a Game Boy screen: give people something to collect and something to argue about with a friend. If you were trading Charizards on a playground in 1999, that pitch still sounds pretty good in 2026.