Kids Still Playing Pokemon Like It's 1999 93
theodp writes "In 1999, TIME's cover warned readers to Beware of Pokemon ('For many kids it's now an addiction: cards, video games, toys, a new movie. Is it bad for them?'). But Pokemon wasn't as easily felled as Lehman or Bear Stearns. Thirteen years later, 16-year-old Manoj Sunny has his eye on a Pokemon world title, having earned the chance to travel to The Big Island with 35 fellow Americans for the 2012 Pokemon Video Game World Championships, which will be held Aug. 10-12. Sunny, who also captains his school's chess team, credits his success to a good memory, intuition, daily practice, the use of an online simulator, and a competitive attitude ('I hate losing. Once I lost, I needed to get better.')"
Re:Nothing like 1999 (Score:2, Informative)
Pokemon figurines? Collector's item at best. Pokemon isn't centered on cards or figures; it's centered on the video game series, and every major release (read as not a spin-off) has outsold the last. Pokemon is just as popular, if not moreso than it has ever been, regardless of your kids' experience. I myself played the hell out of Pokemon growing up, as well as Lego Mindstorms.
Misleading, but true to a degree (Score:3, Informative)
Well... Even to this day Pokemon is the second best selling franchise out there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Selling_Video_Game_Franchises [wikipedia.org]
The 36 people in this article isn't a very large number... A lot of the people that play Pokemon today are actually in our 20s. Addictive? Perhaps a little. But the games have gotten a lot more elaborate than they have in the past. It's more than just collecting them all now, it's about the literally hundreds of things to do in each of the worlds, the oh-so difficult Battle Frontier which very few have beaten, the Breeding to get Pokemon with higher stats and moves not normally known by a particular species, EV training, the mini games, random quests, all of the post-game quests, harvest-moon style farming, and of course, catching them all... Not to mention all of the new multiplayer aspects, like the launcher battles in Black and White (The newest games) which add a whole new depth to battles.
tl;dr I am a Pokemon nut, this article misleads about the general state of the Pokemon franchise, and the age a majority of us are.