The launch of Pokémon Arceus
It’s Super Effective
Pokémon has had many forms over the years. It started as a role-playing video game in 1996 and has since evolved (pun intended) into playing cards, TV, film and mobile gaming
The franchise is one of the biggest in the world, with sales of over 380 million video games and 34 billion trading cards. On top of this, they’ve aired 1,178 TV episodes (not including current season)
The latest edition of their main game franchise, Pokémon Legends: Arceus, was it’s 36th edition when it was released on 28th January
The open-world adventure sold 6.5m copies globally in its first week, the fourth best performance of all video games in the series
Pokemon Legends: Arceus, the 36th edition of the main video game franchise, sold 6.5m copies in its launch week globally
While this is impressive, the most popular game in the series remains the original Red, Blue and Yellow games, which sold a combined 31 million copies since their release over 20 years ago
And Pokémon has grown over that time. You may remember the original 151 Pokémon from Generation I. There are now 905 different Pokémon spanning eight generations, which includes:
- Unown (Gen II) has 28 different forms, one for every letter in the Roman alphabet, and an extra two for a question mark and exclamation mark
- Each Spinda (Gen III) has a unique pattern, with over 4 billion variations available in the games
- Arceus (Gen IV), the protagonist of the latest video game, has 19 different forms, one for every element
- Rotom (Gen IV) is a plasma Pokémon which can take on the form of 5 household appliances, including a washing machine and a lawnmower
- Generation VIII has the first mix-and-match Pokémon, with 4 different combinations available depending on how they are created (called Dracozolt, Arctozolt, Dracovish, and Arctovish)
