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Pokémon is a video game owned by the Japanese video game company Nintendo, owned by The Pokémon Company, and created by Satoshi Tajiri in 1996, focused on the titular creatures. Originally released as a pair of interlinkable Game Boy role-playing video games developed by Game Freak, Pokémon has since become the second-most successful and lucrative video game-based media franchise in the world, behind only Nintendo's own Mario franchise. Pokémon properties have since been merchandised into anime, manga, trading cards, toys, books, and other media.

The franchise celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2006. Cumulative sales of the video games (including home console versions, such as "Hey You, Pikachu!" for the Nintendo 64) have reached more than 200 million copies.[6] In November 2005, 4Kids Entertainment, which had managed the non-game related licensing of Pokémon, announced that it had agreed not to renew the Pokémon representation agreement. Pokémon USA Inc. (now The Pokémon Company International), a subsidiary of Japan's Pokémon Co., now oversees all Pokémon licensing outside of Asia.

The name Pokémon is the romanized contraction of the Japanese brand Pocket Monsters (ポケットモンスター Poketto Monsutā?). The term Pokémon, in addition to referring to the Pokémon franchise itself, also collectively refers to the 719 known fictional species that have made appearances in Pokémon media as of the release of the sixth generation titles Pokémon X and Y. "Pokémon" is identical in both the singular and plural, as is each individual species name; it is grammatically correct to say "one Pokémon" and "many Pokémon", as well as "one Pikachu" and "many Pikachu". (However, Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow feature NPCs referring to the plurals of Clefairy and Diglett with an "s" at the end, shown "CLEFAIRYs" and "DIGLETTs", respectively. This was fixed in FireRed and LeafGreen.)