True ‘90s kids remember the era’s collectibles. There were Beanie Babies, of course, which ended up causing an economic bubble still relevant today. But there were also pogs, which littered school playgrounds, the careful parenting of Tamagotchis, and red-hot trading markets for all sorts of baseball and basketball cards. But in the last years of the decade, a new type of collectible emerged, one that meshed the virtual and the physical and ended up dwarfing all the others combined: Pokémon.
