Network effects.
Link cable trading. Bringing your cards to school and trading them. These were super important in spreading the idea of pokemon across playgrounds.
What really made it a home run was the anime. It exposed parents to what Pokemon was. It also gave it life and constructed a coherent narrative about what pokemon was. It’s not a coincidence that nearly all the early merchandise was based on the anime
This shouldn’t be understated. My earliest exposure was through the anime and cards, then Pokemon Stadium. I didn’t get my first game until Christmas 2001, well after the addiction had taken ahold 
I remember I was at my friend’s house one time and his mum said to him ‘I got the new Pokemon book for you’ which almost felt like its own discovery. That there was stuff beyond the world I knew was extremely exciting (probably the same feeling you got actually playing the games for the first time).
Curious to hear where you read that. Because I read quite the opposite. That after the huge success in Japan, they wanted to try to replicate the success in the west and put a ton of money into the merchandise and advertising campaign.
Absolutely this. My sister, me, and most of our friends were all into Pokémon as kids- there was exactly one boy among us, and he was the older brother of one of my sister’s friends.
Pokémon was one of the only “boy” franchises that also made it okay (and encouraged!) for others to enjoy it as well. There was a lot of the “you can’t play with us” thing with Yu-gi-oh and MTG going on that just wasn’t present with Pokémon from my experience. I have no doubts that it happened, but Pokémon really was enjoyed across the blue/pink toy line that was very prevalent at the time.
A lot of this info came from Nintendo back in the day, but you can read about it through some old links:
“When we started this project in Japan, one of the first things I was told was that this kind of thing would never appeal to American audiences. They said, ‘Because the characters are in a very Japanese style, you cannot sell them to Americans’. So from the very beginning, I never thought there would be an English version. Now, it’s just as popular in the United States [as in Japan], and I realized that we shouldn’t always believe the opinions of conservative marketers.”
Shigeru Miyamoto, August 1999
Possibly the first person to show interest in a North American launch of Pokemon was Minoru Arakawa, founder and then-president of Nintendo of America (NoA). Arakawa visited Japan to participate in Shoshinkai 1996, held November 22-24. It was around this time when he first played one of the three Pokemon titles. He thought the games were promising, but Nintendo of Japan (NoJ) had no plans at the time to release them elsewhere. He returned to America with a few cartridges and tested the game on his employees – they did not believe it would work in the US. At the time, role-playing games (RPGs) were not very popular outside Japan and NoA executives believed that American children did not have the attention span for such a complex game.
Market research turned back negative: American kids reportedly did not like Pokémon. Arakawa ignored the study and, convinced of the franchise’s potential, allocated an enormous budget to Pokémon 's launch. The exact amount was not disclosed, but was reportedly equal to or more than $50 million (roughly $89.77 million in 2022), approximately the same amount as the launch budget of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985.
In 1997, Nintendo of America President MINORU ARAKAWA made the biggest bet of his career. Everyone said he was nuts to import a strange Japanese video game featuring 150 tiny, collectible monsters. Research showed that American kids hated it, and employees dismissed the game as too confusing. But Arakawa persisted–and hit the Pokemon jackpot.
Pokemon is a great shared experience.
Pokemon did so well because it was the first franchise that built a whole ecosystem of products and services. That was brilliant.
Because Pokemon is lit, baller, flames, gas, has that riz.
The synergy with the anime/card game/tcg all at once. Source: young me.
I’ve certainly heard they thought westerners might not take to it because it was an rpg, probably leading to the massive incredible marketing campaigns.
I think this came through from did you know gaming, or some other YouTube channel but they’ve done a lot of translation projects including the og pokedex book which is awesome
Yes, I also watched the DYG videos.
this one is a good one about mew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esIL1W_QBns&ab_channel=DidYouKnowGaming
Actually… it had. Just didn’t survive the test of time.
The digimon series on wonderswan should have been the main competitor to pokemon on game boy.
A pretty sad story overall
Operative word was “popular”! 
re-reading I thought the word was “us”, which anyway, I missed.
Seems that I need to go to sleep
Pokemon’s initial success can almost entirely be attributed to Jynx, and I’m tired of people not giving her the credit she deserves.
Yall can thank Mew
Total immersion, and a successfully integrated element of collecting without having it be simply a slapped-on merchandising scheme… even if it was a gateway drug to merchandising.