Pokémon Snap
The N64 safari where you shot Pokémon with a camera instead of catching them — then took the cartridge to Blockbuster and printed your best photos as actual stickers. Professor Oak judged your framing, a surfing Pikachu was the holy grail, and for one summer in 1999 a photography game was the coolest thing in the store.
Pokémon Snap didn't start as a Pokémon game at all. It began as Jack and the Beanstalk, a photography project for the ill-fated Nintendo 64DD peripheral; when progress stalled, the team rebuilt it as a Pokémon spin-off. Producer Satoru Iwata later admitted the original concept's motivation "wasn't clear" and called the change "a somewhat forced switch to taking pictures of Pokémon" — a forced switch that happened to produce one of the N64's most original games.
Developed by HAL Laboratory with Pax Softnica and published by Nintendo, the game reached Japan on March 21, 1999, and North America on July 26, 1999. As photographer Todd Snap, you ride a rail vehicle called the Zero-One through island courses, snapping up to 60 pictures per outing while Pokémon roam wild — one of the first console Pokémon games, with many creatures rendered in real-time 3D for the first time. Professor Oak rates your best shot of each species on size, pose, and framing; apples and "pester balls" coax better behavior, and special moments like a surfing Pikachu score big. The stroke of genius was physical: Blockbuster stores in North America (and Lawson stores in Japan) installed Snap Station kiosks where kids could bring their own cartridge and print their photos as sticker sheets — a real souvenir from a virtual safari.
Nintendo promoted the game hard, placing it in more than 86,000 hotel rooms, and it sold 1.5 million copies by the end of 1999 while ranking among the year's strongest rentals. Critics called it "addictive" and "innovative." The formula then sat untouched for a generation: the sequel, New Pokémon Snap, didn't arrive until 2021 on the Switch — 22 years of demand for one more ride on the Zero-One.
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The blue-and-yellow torn-ticket empire where Friday nights meant wandering the new-release wall, hoping the big movie wasn't rented out, and dreading the late fees. At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster dominated home entertainment with 9,094 stores worldwide—until Netflix and streaming dismantled the whole business model.
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Nintendo's leap to color: the Game Boy Color arrived in 1998 painting 56 colors on screen at once, with full backward compatibility with original Game Boy games. The screen upgrade alone made Pokémon finally pop in actual colors, and the GBC became essential playground hardware.