Gotta Catch 'Em All
Pokémon International Championship Series | June 7-9
When the Pokémon Company goes below sea-level this June, they won't be using "HM Dive." The largest entertainment franchise in the world has chosen the Crescent City for its main North American event this year.
All About Pokémon
With over 25 years of continuous content spanning video games, anime, trading cards, and films, a massive "Pokémania" in the late 1990s, and an equally-unforgettable mania following the release of the augmented-reality spinoff mobile game Pokémon GO in the summer of 2016, to call the Japanese series Pokémon a major player in pop culture would be an understatement. In fact, with an estimated total of over $88 billion in revenue since 1996, it's widely considered the highest-grossing media franchise on Earth. That's over $40 billion higher than the estimated total for Star Wars and $35 billion than the estimated total for Mickey Mouse.
Centered around collecting and battling over 1000 different species of Pokémon—or "pocket monsters"—the franchise has continued to capture the hearts and imaginations of millions of worldwide fans towards the aim of its most iconic slogan, which is still printed on the back of each and every Pokémon card to this day: "Gotta catch 'em all!" The largest North American event for this series, its leg of the Pokémon International Championships Series could've gone anywhere from New York to Los Angeles with aplomb. But, instead, Pokémon Company International looked to grand old New Orleans and muttered its second most iconic slogan, "I choose you." Fate was sealed, and the festivities are live from June 7-9 at the Morial Convention Center.
The first Pokémon games' Red and Green versions—stylized in the US as Red and Blue versions—on the Game Boy in 1996 were instant hits, equally incapable of staying off store shelves and recess playgrounds. Divided into nine different "generations," and currently eagerly awaiting its 10th, of games, Pokémon has in turn meant a lot to several real-life generations' worth of fans. And though many people associate the franchise with its initial worldwide phenom, things haven't lost steam. In 2022, the release of the most recent mainline Pokémon games, Scarlet and Violet, marked the best-selling single weekend launch of any Nintendo video game ever.
But The Pokémon Company didn't just come to town to reminisce about the series and its legacy. This event is a competition, a competitive battling gauntlet extending from Pokémon's main video games, card games, and Pokémon GO. While there'll certainly be a lot for more casual fans to enjoy, the main event is a real-life, registration-only competition with a combined prize pool of over half a million dollars. Playground hit or not, this isn't child's play.
Ready to Play
In order to get battle ready for an event like this, competitive players of the mainline Pokémon games prepare specialized competitive teams of six Pokémon. These take full advantage of mathematically-optimized Pokémon, which are competitively bred in-game to maximize their maximum possible stat distribution. It's a process that takes countless hours, a process that only really begins after the main storyline of the game has already been beaten and the player has received the honor of being a Pokémon Master. Some parents whose children watched the Pokémon anime series may remember this same title being sought after by the protagonist, Ash Ketchum. For those curious, Ash finally won the title of World Champion in 2022, in episode 132 of season 23, which was the 1219th episode produced of the series. It took time.
Once the teams have all been prepared and registered into the championships, the battles begin on Convention Center Boulevard. The Pokémon video games operate as a turn-based RPG, in which each of a team's six Pokémon have a moveset of four usable actions, with both Pokémon and their moves being divided into 18 different "types"—a set of checks-and-balances that use different sources of energy, whether that be "Fire," "Water," "Fairy," or even just plain old "Normal" to name a few. It gets a lot more complicated than that.
It's worth noting the impact that an event like this has on the summer tourism season. Previous competitive Pokémon events have gone well into five-figure attendee counts in venues ranging from Yokohama and Hawaii to Rio de Janeiro and London. An event like this comes right at the time where the Morial Convention Center continues its progress towards a half-billion dollar renovation, the most visible renovation in the Central Business District since 2005 and, arguably, since the New Orleans World's Fair in 1984.
Hopefully, without wearing out the tens of thousands of die-hard fans who now find themselves checking in across the Crescent City on the weekend of the event, the growth and resilience of New Orleans might even resonate with the world of Pokémon. In the climax of Pokémon Sapphire, the player races to potentially stop a raging flood that threatens to submerge the player's home and world. For some evacuating from Hurricane Katrina and seeing footage of all of South Louisiana and New Orleans drenched under several feet of floodwater, the world of Pokémon gave them something to latch onto. Now, almost 19 years later, it comes full-circle.
The registration is locked, the prize pool is live, and the battles are underway. It's time to see who's the very best, like no one ever was, here in the City That Care Forgot.
