Sitting at my desk and racking my brain for something, anything to say about Pokémon for its thirtieth anniversary, I found myself inexplicably struggling. What do you say about a series like this? With Zelda, there’s easy lines to trace about it as both reflection and architect of many an era’s trends. I could write about the anniversary of Final Fantasy in about a hundred different ways. I even had easy words for NFL Blitz. But Pokémon… What do you say?

Part of it, I suppose, is the breadth of it all. Video games, yes, but trading cards, endless toys, TV shows, movies, and more resilient (and yes, sometimes, more deranged) online communities than just about any other franchise. Plucking out one thing to talk about is difficult. But then again… perhaps that is my clue. The thunderbolt of inspiration hits: that is what it is all about.

When I think about my greatest memories of Pokémon, I realise, it has always first and foremost been a powerful inter-generational experience.

In early 1999, when my mum brought home an early import copy of Pokémon Blue from a trip abroad, Pokémon was indeed just another video game, experienced the way this only child always did: as a solitary experience that I’d then excitedly chatter about with friends at school. I was early to the Pokémon train in the UK by a few months, having asked for and received a US copy after reading about how it was the next big thing in the hallowed pages of ONM or some other precious tome. But then, quickly, it became more than a game: Poke-mania was coming.

The thing about the all-encompassing madness that followed, where it felt for a brief couple of summers that Pokémon had truly totally taken over the world, is that even non-gamers couldn’t miss it. For me, that meant a greater chance that it was something I could truly connect with other people in my life over – and that was what happened. My grandfather became a Pokemaniac.

He wouldn’t know what to do with a Game Boy – but he loved the rest. Newly retired, he was looking for hobbies and he found it in Pokémon, especially the trading card game. He had an affinity for the creatures themselves, which again speaks to the strength and charm of the Pokémon themselves. He would’ve bounced off a game like Magic: The Gathering – but as a nature lover, he adored the fantastical creatures that in this era were more or less all rooted in real-life nature. Like good hobbies do, it began to infect other things he did. He was a painter, and occasionally he’d insert Pokémon into his landscapes. Occasionally, he’d draw new Pokémon ideas of his own.

Pokémon is bigger than it has ever been now, famously the ‘biggest entertainment franchise’ on the planet. But there was something about those early summers where it didn’t just feel big – it felt like it was everything.

For me, the memories just stack up. We watched the TCG trainer video VHS to learn the rules, and then spent countless hours sitting around the dining table of cramped static caravans on half terms and summer holidays with play mats and cards splayed across them. We had two or three decks each, constantly tweaking and upgrading them, and we kept a running count of who had won the most games. He lived outside the video game world, so whenever there was an update on the new Pokémon coming forth in the second generation, I’d fold over the page in the gaming magazine with the info as a bookmark and then take it for him to peruse. I think we saw the first movie three times in the cinema, in part to get more copies of the promotional cards – and then one day he returned home with a dodgy bootleg VHS that I practically wore out.

I can’t quite do justice to what those summers felt like. If you’re young enough to not have been there at that time, understand this: Pokémon is bigger than it has ever been now, famously the ‘biggest entertainment franchise’ on the planet. But there was something about those early summers where it didn’t just feel big – it felt like it was everything.

The great big livestreamed and international Pokémon Championship Competition events we have now are glorious for instance – but to me they pale in comparison to the simple belt-and-braces TCG tour that got ran in the UK in (I think) the year 2000, where a touring rabble of hired guns travelled on behalf of Pokémon’s makers, erecting tents on beaches and in public squares to create would-be Pokémon Gyms. We actually travelled specifically to go to some of these – we both crafted custom decks to take on each of the themed Gym Leaders, and I think ended up with three or four Gym Badges a piece.

Go to a comic convention today and you’ll find stands of professional companies selling oodles of merch and running buy/sell/trade operations with cards – but another fond memory I have is how for a few summers pretty much any local car boot sale was totally taken over by Pokémon. You’d go not just to thrift for NES and Master System games (though I did plenty of that too), but specifically to trade and pad out your collection. I was always a little ahead of him collection-wise, but I quite vividly remember negotiating a trade for the final card granddad needed for his Fossil expansion set to be complete. We were particularly proud to have collated two complete sets of the first three expansions.

I think all these memories are all the more arresting to me because of how organic it was back then – a cottage industry springing up around a surprise hit. It’s all established now, and that’s wonderful, but I’ll forever pine for those days. To an eleven year old, this stuff felt like I was in the game, rather than part of some broader ‘activation’ for the biggest brand in the universe.

What is incredible is that Pokémon is still as magic as it ever was – and that inter-generational joy is still there.

But I digress. That was the better part of thirty years ago. What is incredible is that Pokémon is still as magic as it ever was – and that inter-generational joy is still there. My granddad is gone now, sadly – at his funeral, talking through a list of all the hobbies we shared as part of his eulogy, Pokémon was mentioned. But I’m the old man now, albeit twenty-some years younger than he was at that time. Like I was to him, I now have a little deputy following me around – and Pokémon’s barrier-crossing continues, reverberating down my bloodline. Of all the things we share an interest in – like Mario, Sonic, music, and arcades – the hobby and interest we are most enthusiastic about together is… well, no, sorry. It’s Lego. Fair enough. I’ve wrecked my flow there. But after Lego? It’s Pokémon.

I see those same patterns repeating, and I find it joyous. She covets cards and plushies. If she sees a Pikachu in a shop, she shouts out that it’s Pikachu and gravitates straight towards it. To her, Ash Ketchum is a nobody bum – she’s all about new protagonists Liko and Roy, which makes me shake my head in disgust even if I respect it. The cycle has begun anew.

My heart swells thinking of this, and pondering that lineage. When she’s old enough to be trusted to not wreck them, I will outright give her granddad’s card collection, and I can’t wait for that. But what’s most interesting to me as a critic is how this has also returned me to the franchise. My fandom perhaps waned in the face of too many TCG releases to keep up with and a barrage of games with head-scratching quality control issues. But I now have an unassailable reason to return to the franchise – and I have done.

In my mind I think of this as the Doctor Who cycle – young fans rotate ‘out’ of the series, then return in adulthood and introduce their own children. We’ve never seen a more aggressively successful example of this, in truth, than Pokémon Go’s 2016 zenith, as millennials almost got run over en masse trying to catch ’em all.

It’s true, I think, that any old series can accomplish this sort of sentiment. How many Star Wars fans were raised in this way? But I think series’ that can do it on this scale, with such brilliance, and also doing so while making it all look so effortless – they are impeccably rare. Pokémon is one such series – and that, I suppose, is why it’s the biggest entertainment IP on the planet, or whatever corporate nonsense term we’re deploying to talk about it today. I’ve got a better word for it though: magic.