The Pokemon Company and Nintendo have released new merchandise to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Pokemon Gold and Silver, the popular second generation of the long-running video game franchise. Technically, the anniversary marks the game’s release in Japan in 1999 before it eventually released worldwide in 2000 for the original Game Boy (later receiving remakes through HeartGold and SoulSilver).
The official Pokemon website shed light on the 25th anniversary of Pokemon Gold and Silver by announcing new merchandise such as jackets with reversible designs that feature the game’s Johto region, cups, plates, bookends, backpacks and much more. The highlights are undoubtedly the new plushes for the game’s mascots, Ho-Oh and Lugia, both legendary Pokemon that featured heavily in the story of Gold and Silver.
Now for the kicker: the merchandise appears to be exclusive to the Japanese Pokemon Centre. Nintendo and The Pokemon Company haven’t indicated if the merchandise will be available to purchase outside of Japan anytime soon. Of course, you can always wait for the inevitable scalpers to try and sell the merch on eBay for ridiculous prices but we recommend rather waiting for an announcement from Nintendo first before taking the plunge.
In other Pokemon-related news, developer Game Freak is currently working on the next Pokemon spin-off, Pokemon Legends Z-A which doesn’t have a release date yet. The company suffered from a major hack last month which resulted in internal information being leaked, though luckily none of it found its way to the public (at least that we know of). The hackers managed to get the source code for several Pokemon games as well as data for Pokemon Legends Z-A.
In case you missed it, Pokemon is making waves on mobile phones again with the release of Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket. The recently released mobile game apparently makes $3 million a day from players – that number has surely gone up with the game’s rise in popularity this month.
