Pokémon Trading Card Game Online

» see pokemon.com/tcgo as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Pokemon arrived in Turkey the way it arrived most places outside Japan, as a cartoon, and I was fifteen and several years past the age it was aimed at. The card game came with it and I never learned the rules. By 2011, when this client launched, I was twenty-seven and working, which is a long way from the person a free digital card game is built for.

It started on 24 March 2011 as a browser game called Pokemon Trainer Challenge, built by Dire Wolf Digital and published by The Pokemon Company International. It became a downloadable client for Windows on 15 May 2012 and for macOS that November, reached iOS on 30 September 2014 and Android on 7 April 2016. Over twelve years it went from a marketing attachment to the place where a large part of competitive Pokemon card play actually happened, because it was free and because it did the rules arithmetic for you.

The thing that made it unusual was not the client. It was the code card.

~ the case file ~

~ how the code cards worked ~

From 6 April 2011, starting with the Black and White series, every physical booster pack sold in a shop came with an extra card that was not playable. It carried a printed code. You typed the code into the client and it gave you the digital equivalent of the pack you had just bought. Later sets simplified this further so the code opened an online booster directly.

That single mechanic tied the two economies together. Somebody buying paper cards for a tournament ended up with a growing digital collection they had not asked for. Somebody who only played online could buy code cards in bulk from people who wanted the paper and not the codes, which produced a secondary market in slips of cardboard whose entire value was a string of characters. For twelve years the printed game subsidized the digital one, and the digital one taught people the rules well enough to go and buy printed cards.

~ the day it died ~

The Pokemon Company announced on 20 September 2021 that a replacement was coming, called Pokemon Trading Card Game Live. It slipped into 2022 and then into 2023. The old client was pulled from the App Store and Google Play and the Pokemon website on 5 June 2023, and the servers went off at nine in the morning Pacific time. Live launched globally three days later, on 8 June.

The migration was partial and the company said so in advance. Account information came across. Friends lists did not. In-game currency did not. Neither did the HeartGold and SoulSilver cards, which had been in circulation online since before some of the players were.

~ what got buried with it ~

A card game client is a strange thing to hold a funeral for, because the cards themselves are fine. The paper ones are in binders and the game they play is unchanged. What ended was a specific twelve-year-old ledger of who had opened what, and the fact that the ledger did not fully transfer is the part players took badly.

There is a general rule under this one and it is not specific to Pokemon. A digital collection inside a client owned by the publisher is a record of purchases the publisher is keeping on your behalf, and it lasts exactly as long as the publisher wants to keep running the client. The booster packs were real. The second opening of them was always a service.

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