Poke'mon - The Phenomena!

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Mania for 'Pocket Monsters' Yields Billions for Nintendo By SHARON R. KING

LANGHORNE, Pa.-Lisa Chapman and her two sons camped out in their car in the parking lot of the Oxford Valley Mall here on a recent Friday night so they could beat the crowd at the Pokemon Trading Card Game Tour the next morning. The line formed at 7 a.m., and by the time the event began four hours later, it had swelled to 4,000 kids and their parents.

Many wore handmade Pokemon costumes in hopes of having their pictures taken for the official Pokemon site on the World Wide Web. Marie Summa, 12, of Beverly, N.J., sported a yellow hat with white felt horns and a T-shirt decorated with her favorite Pokemon characters. "She's been wearing that hat for three days," said her father, Thomas.

Similar mob scenes are being repeated across the country. At the Woodbridge Mall in Woodbridge, N.J., many of the 13,000 people who showed up had to be turned away. The craze has invaded schools, too, and several have banned Pokemon cards. "They were getting lost or misplaced and the kids were getting upset," said Richard P. Limato, principal of the Prospect Hill School, one of three elementary schools in Pelham, N.Y., that outlawed them last month.

Pokemon is actually a video game-the cards are just one of the spinoffs-and it is shaping up as one of the biggest blockbusters ever produced by the Nintendo Corp. of Japan. Started in Nintendo's home market three years ago, Pokemon has grown into an international industry that includes comic books, plastic figurines, virtual pets, bean-bag toys, lunch boxes, T-shirts, a television cartoon show and compact disks, with sales so far of nearly $5 billion. In the United States, more than 2.5 million video games have been sold at about $28 each since Pokemon was introduced last September, more than any other hand-held Nintendo product in such a short span. At least 40 licensing deals have been struck, and revenues already exceed $200 million.

That makes it one of the hottest fads of the 1990s among the preteen-age set. The sale of Pokemon cartridges alone, for example, has totaled $70million in just seven months. That compares with $107 million for Sesame Street's Tickle Me Elmo doll from mid-1996 through 1998; $83 million last year for the Teletubbies, the cuddly dolls from Britain, and $80 million for Tamagotchi, a virtual pet, over a 20-month period through December, according to the NPD Group, a research firm in Port Washington, N.Y.

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