Pokémon marks 30 years with a Super Bowl smash | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

Jigglypuff is back—and ready for the big game.

The beloved Pokémon character appears in a 21-second teaser video for a commercial that is set to run during Super Bowl LX on Feb. 8, kicking off a yearlong campaign celebrating the franchise’s 30th anniversary.

In the preview, a CGI Jigglypuff floats around a backstage green room or recording studio, singing a sleep-inducing tune—and nodding off herself.

“As we look to the next 30 years and beyond, we invite Trainers to join in celebrating this landmark milestone, starting with Super Bowl LX, where they’ll see themselves and their fandom reflected in unexpected ways,” said Kenji Okubo, president of The Pokémon Company International.

The commercial is guaranteed to attract eyeballs: Last year’s Super Bowl set a U.S. television record for viewership, averaging 127.7 million across broadcast, cable, and streaming platforms.

Of course, this exposure doesn’t come cheap. A 30-second Super Bowl LX commercial in 2026 costs advertisers around $8 million, with some spots reaching as high as $10 million.

Pokémon has staying power

Pokémon is hardly hurting financially.

In fact, it is the highest-grossing media franchise of all time, consisting of video games, animated series and films, a trading card game, and other related media, with estimated total lifetime revenue of $115–147 billion.

More economic analysis:

Its universe, in which humans co-exist with creatures known as Pokémon, has hundreds of millions of fans worldwide. The video games have sold nearly 500 million units, and the Pokémon Trading Card Game has produced over 75 billion cards globally as of 2025.

So, how did we get here? How did these “Pocket Monsters” become so monstrously successful?

Pokémon is heading to the Super Bowl.

Pokémon/YouTube

The Pokemon story

Our story goes back to 1996, when Bill Clinton was in the White House, a 30-second Super Bowl ad cost $1.085 million, the Palm Pilot debuted, and IBM’s (IBM) Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov for the first time.

The franchise debuted on Nintendo’s Game Boy on Feb. 27 of that year. Manga, trading cards, and anime followed, expanding internationally by 1998–2001.

Pokémon: The First Movie was released in the United States in 1999 and grossed more than $172 million worldwide.

“Gotta catch ’em all,” the franchise’s English-language marketing slogan, describes the trainer’s goal of collecting every creature and appeared in the original anime theme song and on early game packaging.

As of February, there are 1,025 distinct Pokémon species officially recognized in the National Pokédex.

But, still, 30 years? How could these characters possibly last so long while many other character-driven franchises came and went?

Robert Thompson, Professor of Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, shares his view:

“I think it would be a bigger question if it didn’t last,” he said. “There was so much about this that was appealing. When this stuff was coming out, I remember thinking, ‘man, I wish we had cool stuff like this when I was a kid.’ We had Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots and Slinky. But this wasn’t just Game Boy or collecting cards—it was a whole lifestyle, and it grew up with you.”

Pokémon Go—a revolution of its own

Thompson noted that Pokémon isn’t the first multiplatform entertainment phenomenon, citing the cultural craze sparked by Disney’s (DIS) Davy Crockett TV show in the 1950s.

“You could get the bed sheets, you could buy the cereal, you could get the coonskin cap, and thousands of things,” he said. “So, this isn’t the first time we’ve had a totally synergized entertainment industrial complex. But I think part of the fun with Pokémon was that it wasn’t American. It was ‘kawaii,’ meaning cute.”

“And just when you think you can go a few days without hearing about Pokémon, they come up with another way to make that not happen.”

That became abundantly clear in 2016 with Pokémon Go, an augmented reality mobile game that uses a smartphone’s GPS and camera to let players find, catch, train, and battle virtual creatures in the real world.

It was one of the most-used and profitable mobile apps in its debut, downloaded over 500 million times globally by the end of the year, and credited with revolutionizing mobile gaming.

“That was a major revolution of its own,” said Ethan Segal, Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. “When Pokémon Go launched, I didn’t know what was going on. I was in the university library. I looked out the window and saw all these college kids wandering around, staring at handheld devices.”

Segal said this next step, where trainers could interact with a world that didn’t exist, “made the whole gaming experience much more interactive than it had been before.”

The franchise shows no sign of slowing down, which begs the question: Will we still be discussing Pokémon three decades from now?

“I’m sure we’ll be talking about it 10 years from now,” Segal said. “I’m reluctant to predict 30 years, but they’ve done a good job staying in the popular consciousness. I know kids who still play it today who weren’t born when it first launched, so it seems Pokémon will be with us for at least a while yet.”