Today I was looking for more granular information to outline a timeline for the publicly perceived shift in popularity during the early years, when I came across an article published by Bloomberg 4 years ago. In it they discuss various effects of the boom and subsequent bust of pokemon, financially.
Can read here.
U.S. stocks are at all-time highs and the Pokemon craze is in full hysteria.
The year, of course, is 1999 — though it bears a striking resemblance to the current day.
Shares of Nintendo Co. Ltd. went gangbusters on Monday, rising 24 percent in Japan, amid the surprisingly successful launch of Pokemon Go, an augmented reality game that’s allowed millennials to relive a version of their childhood they never could have dreamed of.
Shares of Nintendo Soaring
Before there was Pokemon Go — or even a smartphone to play it on — there was the original video game made for Nintendo’s Game Boy device, that spawned an entire industry of related productions, including an animated cartoon series based on the game’s characters.
A company called 4Kids Entertainment Inc. was responsible for dubbing the Japanese cartoon into English, and also served as a licensing agent for Pokemon-related products. In July of 1999, the stock started to go parabolic, fueled by young millennials’ insatiable appetite for all things pocket monsters.
1468261158_KIDEQ US Equity (4Kids Entertain 2016-07-11 14-18-50
Source: Bloomberg
The 4Kids’ surge also dragged other secondary and tertiary plays on the Pokemon craze along for the ride. For instance, news that Grand Toys International struck a deal to sell Pokemon merchandise to Canadian customers, and that another firm, Toymax, was launching a line of Pokemon-related candy and gum sent those stocks up by 121 percent and 46 percent, respectively, by the end of September, as detailed by Dow Jones’ Paul La Monica.
No connection to the wildly popular franchise was too tenuous: the company that produced the soundtrack for the TV series and the first Pokemon movie, Paradise Music and Entertainment, saw its shares fly like a Zapdos.
With the dot-com bubblebath in full swing, kids were even selling their Pokemon-related web sites to fund their college education, as the Wall Street Journal’s Thomas Weber documented in Oct. 1999.
Shares of 4Kids rose ninefold from the start of July through their Nov. 8 peak. But even as the first film topped the U.S. box office charts, the stock came tumbling down — and Pokemon paraphernalia soon followed.
In Jan. 2001, the New York Times documented how the prized and powerful Charizard Pokemon card had tanked in value from $375 to $100. However, one 14-year-old observer named Jimmy O’Brien made what has proved to be a prescient call on the franchise.
‘‘Everything old is new again,’’ he told the Times. ‘‘Lava lamps went out and came back, so this might, too.’’
There is a particular image they attached to the article to illustrate the Pokémon phenomenon in the form of a stock market chart for the now delisted company 4kids entertainment, the company that obtained rights to dub pokemon in english. The company went from being relatively small and insignificant to seeing explosive investment growth, to then seeing a significant fall in parallel with Pokémon’s popularity.
I thought this Data may be an interesting backdrop upon which to affix a timeline of TCG releases, paired with the new TV show seasons as they aired.
Personally I found the results quite interesting and thought I would love to share it with you all.
Note:
- The set markers are aligned to the start of each set release and don’t reflect the duration of their print run.
- 4kids Entertainment had other license rights for dubbing other series too, but pokemon was their winning lottery ticket.
- 4kids dubbed until season 8 (1999-2005) and licensed other titles such as Yugioh.
As a side note: The article above mentions a New York Times article from back in January 2001. If you want a laugh then it’s worth a read.
Can be read here.
Mike Loprete stood at the counter of a comic-book store, slowly shook his 11-year-old head and remembered when he was rich.
Back in 1999, when the Pokemon fad was the talk of every playground, Mike’s collection of cards, neatly stored at his home in Roseland, N. J., was worth hundreds of dollars. But like investors in dot-com flameouts and other once-highflying technology stocks who thought the Nasdaq could rise forever, Mike sat on his assets and watched them dwindle away.
‘‘I should have sold,’’ Mike said. ‘‘I could have had three times as much as I paid for them.’’
Fads and fancies have sent the value of all kinds of assets soaring since the earliest days in finance. And from 17th-century Dutch tulips to present day Internet stocks, such bubblebaths have inevitably burst.
But for millions of young Americans, their first introduction to volatile markets has been Pokemon trading cards. A large number of them have been given a hard lesson about how scarcity can temporarily drive up prices, but that many assets – be they Pokemon cards or technology companies – are only valuable if sold at the right time.
A year ago, Pokemon cards were the most popular plaything on the planet. Elementary schools were forced to ban the cards as schoolyard speculators ignored their math homework and frenetically bought and sold rare holographic foil cards on the playground. Dealers marked up $3 packets of cards to $12 or more. The rarest cards sold for as much as $375.
Now the card market has virtually collapsed and Pokemon ‘‘thousand-aires’’ have watched their net worth be wiped out.
At New World Manga, a store in Livingston, N. J., specializing in comics and card games, children still gather every Friday for the weekly Pokemon league. But even many of these diehard players said the glory days of collecting had passed.
As others played the card game behind him, Alex Formato, a 12-year-old Pokemon collector from West Orange, N. J., sold three relatively rare cards to Tung Cheng, co-owner of New World Manga. Last year, Alex would have been paid in cash. These days he just gets store credit, a sign of how far the Pokemon market has fallen. Alex has some 10,000 cards, and there are days he wonders why he held on to them. Why didn’t he sell last spring when Pokemon cards were still the hottest thing around?
‘‘I have the original set completed,’’ Alex said. ‘‘Everyone used to want the whole set. It would have been worth $400; now it’s $200 or less.’’
On eBay, the highest bids for the first edition base-set Charizard, a rare Pokemon card once valued at $375, have been $100 lately. Booster packs that dealers were paying $4.75 for can now be had for $1, said Brian Wallos, a collectibles dealer. Boxes of Japanese cards that a year ago fetched $300, now sell for $80, he said.
Mr. Wallos dove into the Pokemon fad in 1999 but these days he is back to buying and selling Beanie Babies. And kid culture has moved on to the next thing.
‘‘Now everyone likes Digimon,’’ said Molly Berenhaus, 10, after winning a game during last week’s Pokemon league at New World Manga.
Michael Krois, the chief executive of Affiliate Pros, which runs a Pokemon card trading site, said he had watched the number of cards sold on his site plummet just as the bull market began to lose steam.
‘‘I found the amount of cards sold on my site was directly proportional to the stock market’s value,’’ said Mr. Krois. ‘‘When it dipped I sold fewer cards. The number of daily visitors to my site, just like Nasdaq, peaked in April.’’
The first casualties of the fall of Pokemon, created by Nintendo, were the toy companies. Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro division that publishes the cards and operates specialty stores that sell them, laid off 100 people last month after citing softening demand for Pokemon.
Inside a Wizards of the Coast store in Woodbridge, N. J., Mike Reilly smiled as he recalled the thrill he felt during the height of the Pokemon craze: March 21, 1999. That was the day when the Pokemon road tour came to Woodbridge Center, Mike’s hometown mall.
Every store in the mall sold out of Pokemon cards, and Mike, 16, sat in a corner with his protective binders, selling from his collection of 2,000 cards. He made $180 that day, but decided to sell only a few cards and keep the best ones. ‘‘I held on to most of the cards because I thought the prices would go up more,’’ he said. ‘‘But now the whole Pokemon fad is starting to die down.’’
Other youngsters have been left wondering why anyone was paying over $300 for a single shiny trading card in the first place.
‘‘It’s kind of funny that regular cards with foil-ly stuff on them were ever worth so much,’’ said Molly, the 10-year-old who does not care about card prices but is disappointed that it is getting harder and harder to find people with whom to play the actual Pokemon game.
But more than a few Pokemon players, like technology stock bulls who saw Gateway’s disappointing holiday computer sales figures as a buying opportunity, think the game will be back.
Zach Jacobs, 11, of Florham Park, N. J., bought a price guide last year and calculated the value of his hundreds of Pokemon cards: they were supposedly worth more than $2,000. He sold a few cards to friends, getting $18 for a couple of them. But he only made about $80 total on his sales, just a fraction of the money he spent to buy his cards.
He has not gone back to the price guides to see how far the value of his collection has fallen. And that would not be reliable anyway. Some guides, their livelihood dependent on interest in Pokemon remaining strong, have kept the list prices for Pokemon cards high despite falling prices on eBay, among wholesale dealers and in schoolyard transactions.
Meanwhile, some price guide editors, along with collectors like Zach, predict that prices will rebound.
‘‘Probably when the new sets come out the prices will go up again,’’ Zach said.
Jimmy O’Brien, a longhaired 14-year-old with a wispy moustache as well as a Pokemon baseball cap and jacket, said part of the problem was that people were selling Pokemon at outrageous, unjustifiable prices. But he does not think the Pokemon cards are down for good.
‘‘Everything old is new again,’’ said Jimmy, who has traveled to Los Angeles and Minnesota to compete in Pokemon tournaments. ‘‘Lava lamps went out and came back, so this might, too.’’
But there are other former Pokemon players who say the game is over. The cards, part of an elaborate marketing campaign, were created for two players to face off with their own carefully constructed decks of Pokemon characters. Players randomly draw several Pokemon from their deck, then flip coins to see how much damage their characters can inflict on their opponents. But the game is based too much on luck and not enough on strategy, argue some disillusioned players like Sam Messina, 12, of Livingston, N. J.
Last October, Sam got out. He swapped his best Pokemon cards for another trading card game called Magic: The Gathering.
‘‘Pokemon was getting old and boring and all my friends were playing Magic,’’ he said. ‘‘I feel, sort of, that I got a good deal for my cards, although I still have boxes and boxes of Pokemon cards.’’
Colin Oettle, 13, of Livingston, N. J., bought his first Pokemon cards in 1998 before the fad really took off. When other kids caught on, he watched the list price of his cards surge past the value of his carefully compiled collection of glass collected from beaches and wondered what he should do.
‘‘I’ve thought about selling from time to time and get the extra money,’’ Colin said, ‘‘but I’ve never done it.’’
Colin’s mother, Robin Oettle, 48, a graphic artist, plays with her son in New World Manga’s Pokemon league. She is happy the card prices have fallen and does not have any regrets that her son did not cash out.
‘‘For me it’s a turnoff to have to spend a lot of money on cards,’’ she said. ‘‘Neither of us would ever sell. Both of us are too nostalgic. I know what it will feel like for him to be 30 and find his Pokemon collection. That is something more valuable than making a few bucks.’’
Now that the market has collapsed, Colin said he could not obsess over the missed opportunity, advice investors in, say, Priceline.com or Pets.com may find hard to be so grown-up about. Colin is moving on to playing Magic now, but said his Pokemon days had honed his skills at addition, improved his organization and taught him about the value of collecting, not to mention the fickleness of markets.
‘‘It’s a little disappointing,’’ Colin said. ‘‘But life is life.’’
