Pokemon Card GB: The Video Game That Came With a Real Card

Pokemon Card GB is one of the odder corners of the Game Boy's Pokemon story: a video game about a card game. Released in Japan in December 1998, it turned the real-world Pokemon Trading Card Game into a single-player adventure for the handheld, all deck-building and duels on a green screen. On its own the cartridge is common and easy to find. What makes this particular copy worth a second look is something small that shipped in the box beside it, and almost never stayed there.

A complete Pokemon Card GB: box, cartridge, manuals and inserts, with the original holographic Dragonite promo still present.

A trading card game you played on a Game Boy

The game itself is a small marvel of circular logic. Rather than collecting physical cards and hunting for an opponent, you travelled between clubs, built decks from more than two hundred cards drawn from the early sets, and challenged a series of Grand Masters to become champion. It was developed by Hudson Soft and Creatures, published by Nintendo, and built as a dual-mode cartridge, so despite the Game Boy Color branding on the box it runs perfectly well on the original DMG-01. In the collection it is catalogued as Pokemon Card GB.

The card in the box: Dragonite No. 149

The clever part was the pack-in. Every Japanese copy of the game shipped with a genuine promotional card for the real trading card game: a holographic Dragonite, Level 41, with 100 HP, numbered 149, which happens to be Dragonite's own entry in the Pokedex. For a child in 1998 this was a small jackpot. Dragonite was a beloved pseudo-legendary dragon, the sort of card that was hard to pull from a booster pack, and here it was being handed out free with a video game, in holo no less. The promo even carried Game Boy branding, a deliberate bridge between the digital trading card game on the screen and the physical one in your hands.

The pack-in prize: the holographic Dragonite promo, No. 149, that shipped with every Japanese copy of the game.

It was not quite alone. The game's official Japanese guidebook, published in early 1999, carried a Venusaur promo, and a 1999 issue of CoroCoro Comic included a Meowth, so Card GB spawned a small family of tie-in cards. But the Dragonite was the one that came in the box with the cartridge, and the only one most owners ever held. It was also a Japanese privilege: when the game reached the West in 2000 as Pokemon Trading Card Game, the pack-in promo did not travel with it.

Why a complete copy is the rare one

Here is the quiet problem that makes this set scarce. The game itself is common. It sold well and the cartridges survive in large numbers. The card did not stay with them. A loose promo slipped into the box next to the manual is the first thing a young owner pulls out to play with, trade away, or slide into a binder with the rest of a collection. Decades later the game turns up almost everywhere, yet a copy that still has its original Dragonite, unbent and unfaded, appears only rarely.

The cartridge itself, a dual-mode release that plays on the Game Boy Color and the original DMG-01 alike.

That scarcity has not gone unnoticed. The Dragonite is a sought-after card in its own right, and a pristine, professionally graded example can reach four figures on its own, before the game it came with is even counted. A complete boxed copy, card still present and in good order, is therefore a genuine prize, worth far more than a common cartridge and a well-played card added together, because what is really being valued is that the two were never separated.

The keystone of a complete Pokemon shelf

What makes this piece worth keeping is not only its scarcity. It is a complete snapshot of a clever, slightly circular moment, when Nintendo used a video game to sell a card game and a card game to sell a video game, and sweetened the deal with a holographic dragon. Finding it intact, game, box, inserts and the Dragonite still together, is finding that moment exactly as it left the shop in 1998.

With it, the collection holds the full run of Game Boy Pokemon games that will play on the original DMG-01: the first-generation Red, Green, Blue and Yellow, both Gold and Silver, and this Card GB. Only Crystal is missing, and only because it was built for the Game Boy Color and will not run on the 1989 hardware at all. A copy of the one that is hardest of all to find whole, card and everything, makes a fitting keystone for that set. The wider story of how these games took over the handheld is told in Pokemon and the Game Boy, and the games themselves live in the Pokemon corner of the collection.