It is difficult to remember Pokémon as a new thing. Web Japan still has a page from when that was exactly what it was.
Visit the Kids Web Japan Pokémon archive
Filed in the October-December 1997 section of Kids Web Japan’s What’s Cool in Japan archive, the article explains Pocket Monsters to an overseas audience before the franchise had become permanent global furniture.
The numbers already looked dangerous. The page says the Game Boy title went on sale in February 1996 and sold more than six million copies in its first eighteen months. It describes 151 kinds of monsters, the map-based hunt through towns, forests and oceans, and the ability to capture, raise, trade and battle them.
Most importantly, it notices the link cable.
Pokémon was not merely another cartridge. Kids could connect Game Boys, trade monsters and compete with friends. That social mechanic is now obvious enough to disappear into franchise history, but the contemporary page treats it as one of the reasons children were going wild for the game.
A franchise caught while it was still becoming one
The archive records the speed of the expansion.
Strategy books appeared alongside the games. Manga followed. The television series began in April 1997. Toys, stuffed animals, stationery and food packaging were already carrying the characters.
In August 1997, East Japan Railway held a Pokémon stamp rally across 30 major stations. Kids traveled from checkpoint to checkpoint filling booklets with character stamps. Web Japan reports that more than 100,000 fans participated.
Then the page captures a much darker piece of contemporary history. It notes that television broadcasts were temporarily suspended in December 1997 after several hundred children experienced convulsions and dizziness following an episode with intense flashing effects.
That incident is now part of Pokémon lore. Here it appears not as retrospective trivia but as current news sitting beside a radio show and plans for a movie.
That is why surviving contemporary web pages matter.
A modern history of Pokémon knows what happened next: Pikachu became internationally recognizable, the franchise expanded across generations of Nintendo hardware, and the original 151 became only the first layer of an enormous catalog.
The old page does not know any of that yet.
It is standing inside the explosion with a Game Boy, a cable and a train-station stamp booklet.
For CacheRat’s Ancient Web project, contemporary pages like this are unusually valuable. Later histories explain significance. Old pages preserve uncertainty, terminology and scale before everybody knew how the story ended.
Pokémon eventually became history.
This page caught it while it was still news.