Pokémon turns 30 — how the fictional pocket monsters shaped science

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• 27 February 2026

Pokémon turns 30 — how the fictional pocket monsters shaped science

The Japanese media sensation has inspired generations of researchers in fields as diverse as evolution, biodiversity and research integrity.

Miryam Naddaf0

Miryam Naddaf

Miryam Naddaf is a reporter for Nature in London.

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Pokémon has been an inspiration for researchers since its creation 30 years ago.Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty

On 27 February 1996, Japanese game designer Satoshi Tajiri released the first ever Pokémon games for the Nintendo Game Boy. What started as a childhood passion for collecting insects grew into a giant franchise and global phenomenon with themes of science at its heart.

The fictional world of Pokémon has found its way into science and academic research, including ecology, fossils, evolution, biodiversity, education and even calling out predatory journals.

“It influenced my idea of what animals and natural history were, almost before I knew what real animals in the real world were like,” says Arjan Mann, assistant curator of fossil fishes and early tetrapods at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, who was a child when the television series came out.

For Pokémon’s 30th anniversary, Nature spoke to scientists from around the world about how their work has been shaped by playing Pokémon games, watching animated TV series and films and trading cards in school playgrounds.

Gotta catch ’em all

For some researchers, themes in the Pokémon games mirror their everyday work. Spencer Monckton, a research scientist at the University of Guelph in Canada, who grew up playing the games and watching the TV series, says that collecting Pokémon is “very much the same thing as what an entomologist does. They’re trying to catch them all.”

The players also learn how to categorize the diverse fictional creatures according to their features and abilities. “That’s just classification. That is exactly what a taxonomist does,” adds Monckton.

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