Look, I get it: there’s absolutely nothing interesting or special about not being interested in football. People who are performatively uninterested in watching sports are deeply tiresome. But I have a special excuse: I’m British. To me the Super Bowl is like a broadcast from an alien planet, recognizable in some respects, but completely indecipherable in others. Although I hear it has commercials and a nice bit of live music in the middle. One of those commercials, however, has piqued my interest: Pokémon is making some noise about having bought one of those impossibly expensive spots as the launch of its 30th anniversary promotions.
Admittedly, my Britishness is not a very good excuse. Not least because I have friends who’ll be staying up literally all night to watch the event, and even some who already know the names of the teams involved. But they are oddities on our isle, those willing to start watching an hours-long live sporting event that begins at 11.30 p.m. And despite my reading that a game of your American Football only lasts 60 minutes but for all the stopping and starting, apparently the entire Super Bowl event goes on for more than four hours. (Also my excuse becomes tattered nonsense when I also admit to having lost many a night’s sleep to stay up watching a U.S. baseball game, because that is the only good sport, and go Phillies.)
I’ve tried to come to terms with the rules of football. I’ve spent a lot of time in the States (when it felt safe to visit), and I spent a lot of that time watching baseball either in stadia or on ESPN, and fell deeply in love. And I know from that experience that my issue with football is that I don’t understand how to understand it, rather than there being anything inherently wrong with the sport itself. Like that moment when it clicked that baseball wasn’t about the batting but the pitching, I’m sure if I dedicated the time, the true nature of NFL games would slot into place for me, I’d understand its chess-like elements, and see more than what appears to be rugby with every last element of fun removed.
But what I am far less likely to ever come around to is the crassness of celebrating the Super Bowl for its commercials. The most expensive spots on U.S. TV are spoken about each year as if they represent a cultural moment, with the ads rated for their entertainment value and artistic merit, as if these constant interruptions are benefiting the viewer in any way. I detest advertising, I do all I can to avoid it in all its forms, and god I’m such a bloody hypocrite because I really want to see what Pokémon has lined up.
The Pokémon 30th anniversary begins at the Super Bowl
2026 is Pokémon‘s 30th anniversary, and The Pokémon Company International (TPCi) has announced it will begin a year-long “campaign” to mark this beginning with a commercial during February 8’s Super Bowl LX. As a teaser for this, it has released a peculiar 21-second promo featuring Jigglypuff goofing around in what looks like a recording studio’s editing suite.
It had been expected that TPCi would be waiting until February 27 to begin the anniversary noise, given that’s what’s become known as Pokémon Day, to match the date on which the original Pokémon Red and Green launched in Japan in 1996. While there has been no official announcement, it’s inevitable that on that date we’ll receive a Pokémon Direct that will—and here I’m very confidently speculating—give us the first details about Pokémon‘s Gen X starters, and likely an announcement for a new mainline entry in the game series due to launch before Christmas 2026. It’s been four years since Pokémon Scarlet and Violet released, the longest gap between main games in 15 years, and it’d be a new level of crazy, even for Nintendo, not to see the tenth generation of pocket monsters arrive for the 30th birthday.
As for the Super Bowl spot itself, it’s probably best not to get hopes too high. Recent teases like the Jigglypuff clip above have resulted in deep anticlimaxes, like all the excitement over a Pikachu-led music game resulting in, instead, an hour-long “DJ set” ahead of last July’s Direct. TPCi describes the forthcoming commercial spot as something that will” illustrate the brand’s mission to bring people together through a shared love of Pokémon and honor its growing audience of diverse, global and multigenerational fans across three decades,” and indeed where fans will “see themselves and their fandom reflected in unexpected ways.” Which to me sounds like a super-long montage of Pokémon nostalgia amounting to reminding you that you loved it at some point in the past.
Alongside this, the various international versions of the online Pokémon Center stores are selling 30th anniversary gubbins, but there’s no point even linking them as at the time of writing they’ve all inevitably gone down under the weight of scalpers scooping it all up.
© KotakuAnd yet, for all my cynicism, I really want to see what is being put together. TPCi are capable of some truly extraordinary advertising campaigns that play out more like VHS horror than commercials, and while it’s too much to hope it’d lean that weird during the big football game, it at least creates the possibility of something that’s not wholly generic. Yes, it’s much more likely to be a cloying play on your childhood memories, but let me be the optimist. Not quite optimistic enough that I’ll stay up until 2 a.m. to watch whatever comes of it, let alone sit through the interminable stop-starting of men in suits of armor crying because someone trod on their toe. (Dear God, America, watch some rugby union and get a grip.) But I’ll likely seek it out the following morning, not least because of a naive hope for a glimpse of Gen X starters hiding somewhere in there.
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