In 1973, Japanese food company Calbee started attaching free collectable baseball player cards to its potato chip packets (and continues to do so today). It was mimicking a trend that had already taken off in tobacco markets in Japan and overseas. Baseball, Japan’s national sport, was an obvious choice for Calbee to attract consumers.

Some four years later, rival company Lotte joined the trend, launching a chocolate wafer snack with Bikkuriman “surprise man” stickers. These stickers quickly caught on – and eventually spawned an entire fantasy world that made its way to anime and manga.

Both Calbee and Lotte helped set a template for how children’s collectables could become objects of desire, competition and, later, nostalgia. Bikkuriman is still sold today, with rare 1980s Super Zeus stickers going for thousands of dollars to adult collectors.

It was against this backdrop that Satoshi Tajiri (born 1965) grew up. He would have been about 12 when the first Bikkuriman card was released. Satoshi himself would end up creating one of the most popular collectable card games in the world: Pokémon.

These cards are now so highly coveted they are driving international crime, getting banned from schools, and locked behind glass cabinets in stores.

Creating the cultural conditions for a hit

Satoshi drew on a childhood memory when he created Pokémon (short for “Pocket Monsters”): catching insects and trading them with friends.

He imagined a Nintendo Game Boy game where players could collect and exchange monsters. After........

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