Happy Pokémon Day: 30 Years of the Greatest Franchise on Earth

Published 27 February 2026  ·  CHEEVO

Today is Pokémon Day. And not just any Pokémon Day, today marks 30 years since Pokémon Red and Green first launched in Japan on 27 February 1996, introducing the world to 151 creatures, a boy named Satoshi, and an idea so simple and so irresistible that it became the highest-grossing entertainment franchise in history. Three decades later, Pokémon isn't showing the slightest sign of slowing down. If anything, 2026 feels like the beginning of something rather than a celebration of something past.

For UK fans, today is a big one. The Pokémon Presents showcase aires at 2pm GMT this afternoon and will be one of the longest Pokémon Day broadcasts ever bringing with it a wave of announcements that will keep the community talking for weeks. Here's everything that's happening today, and why this particular anniversary matters for collectors.

What's Happening Today

The centrepiece of Pokémon Day 2026 is the Pokémon Presents showcase, which aires this afternoon and marks the official start of the franchise's year-long 30th anniversary celebration. Expectations are already high going in, and The Pokémon Company had already dropped one major announcement in advance.

Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, the beloved 2004 Game Boy Advance remakes of the original Red and Green, are available to download on Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 today, immediately following the Presents broadcast. For an entire generation of UK players who grew up with a GBA in their hands, this is a significant moment. Kanto on a TV screen. The original 151, remastered and accessible again.

Today also marks the launch of the first-ever official LEGO Pokémon sets — a collaboration that somehow took three decades to happen and has immediately produced some of the most coveted Pokémon merchandise in years. The first three sets feature Pikachu, Eevee, Venusaur, Charizard, and Blastoise reimagined in LEGO brick form. For collectors, these are already on the radar as pieces worth keeping sealed.

Beyond today's announcements, the community has been buzzing with speculation about Generation 10, rumoured under the working titles Pokémon Winds and Waves, and what else the year-long celebration has in store. Whatever lands in the Presents, today is unmistakably a milestone.

Thirty Years of Collecting

What makes Pokémon genuinely unique as a franchise is the way it operates across every medium simultaneously. The games launched the franchise in 1996. The Trading Card Game arrived that same year and immediately became a phenomenon in its own right. UK playgrounds in the late 1990s were effectively a secondary TCG market. The anime, the films, the merchandise, the spin-offs... every arm of the franchise feeds the others, and every arm has generated collectibles that carry real weight thirty years later.

The TCG alone has become one of the most significant collectible markets in the world. Logan Paul's PSA 10 Pikachu Illustrator selling for $16.5 million this month is an extreme example, but the broader market tells the same story at every level, graded first edition holos, base set cards in PSA slabs, rare promos distributed at events that most people have long since lost. The condition, the grade and the provenance all matter, and it matters more every year.

The games tell a parallel story. First-edition GBA cartridges, original Game Boy releases, sealed copies of FireRed and LeafGreen are objects that connect directly to specific moments in the franchise's history. Today, as FireRed and LeafGreen relaunch on Switch, those original GBA cases carry a meaning they didn't quite have yesterday. They're the originals. The physical proof that you were there before the remaster.

The Anniversary Effect on Collectibles

Major anniversaries do something specific to collector markets. They reactivate interest and remind people what they own. The 25th anniversary in 2021 drove a wave of renewed TCG collecting that the market is still feeling today. The 30th is bigger. Super Bowl ads, the largest Pokémon Presents in years, LEGO sets, Switch rereleases, a year-long celebration programme. The Pokémon Company is treating this as a genuine cultural moment, and the collector market responds to those in kind.

If you're a UK collector, whether your focus is graded TCG cards, original game cartridges, sealed collector's editions, or the LEGO sets that launched today, the things you own right now are part of a franchise at the height of its cultural visibility. That's worth acknowledging. And it's worth making sure what you own is actually visible rather than sitting in a box.

Get It on the Wall

At CHEEVO, we make display frames for the two things Pokémon collectors are most likely to want to show off: graded TCG slabs and physical game cases. Our frames are UV-protective, precision-fit, and designed to sit on your wall rather than gather dust on a shelf. Whether it's a PSA graded Charizard, a first-edition GBA copy of FireRed, or a sealed Switch cartridge you're keeping pristine, it belongs somewhere it can be seen.

Thirty years is a long time to have kept something. Today feels like the right day to finally put it on the wall.