Forget any of the great sports you know and love, because making enslaved animals fight tooth and nail to the point of exhaustion is now the pinnacle of human endeavour. At least it is according to this new Super Bowl trailer for the 20th anniversary of Pokémon. To be honest, we find it hard to argue.
It’s seems insane, but it really has been two decades of collecting cards, catching ’em all, and crying like a baby at that bit in the first movie where Ash gets to turned to stone (we all did, don’t lie).
There’s no news of another entry in the core franchise to mark the anniversary (at least not yet), although we will be getting Pokken Tournament for the Wii U along with re-releases of the original Red and Blue on the 3DS e-Shop.
We’ll also be getting a new smartphone game called Pokémon Go in which you can catch monsters on your real life travels, encouraging you to go and explore. Maybe you’ll find Mew under that bridge where you once saw two homeless people fighting. Who knows?
The Super Bowl trailer then, is essentially just to celebrate 20 years of trying to be the very best, and it’s sure to give fans all over the world a hefty dose of the feels. The Pokémon Company forked over millions to make this happen, but let’s be real; they can afford it.
A whopping 21.5 billion Pokémon cards have been sold, and more than 275 million copies of the various games have been shifted worldwide. We shudder to think just how many Zubats in total people have ran into.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.