It was a sight rarely seen — and one to behold — at Powell Street BART station this weekend. Instead of ads featuring AI-generated sneaker models and code review agents for code generated by agents, the walls of the station featured a Team Rocket takeover. Ads for a fictional team of supervillains promoting a mobile game can feel like a reprieve from the usual crap shilled around these parts.
If you had not seen any of these ads, or the breathless press coverage, or really, any of the Pokémon-branded festivities that have popped up all over the city these past few weeks, it was all in service of the Pokémon World Championships and the accompanying PokémonXP fan convention that took over downtown San Francisco this weekend.
Unless you (or a loved one) care about this fictional universe of collectible creatures — or have played a Pokémon game after, like, 2003 — there was really no reason to be aware of it. (A friend admitted this weekend that she had no idea this global event was even at the city until she saw a KTVU report on it Friday night.)
But even for the non-devotees among us, to be transported to a San Francisco where Pokémon reign supreme for a weekend felt a bit like a miracle. Here is a vision of the city that does not presume the inevitability of the AI boom that’s reshaping downtown in its own distorted image. Even if it is a fictional universe, there were 50,000 real people who gathered to celebrate the real-life, human-made art and fandom that animates the Pokémon franchise.
Instead of engineers and designers at the world’s wealthiest companies running across Market Street between networking meetings and industry panels, families strolled the area, wearing T-shirts with their favorite Pokémon on it and plushies clipped on their sleeves and bags to match. Homages to the city’s cable cars, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Painted Ladies, among other tourist-y SF landmarks, around the convention were charming, well-crafted, and importantly, not slop. Exhibits inside the convention celebrated human artists, their art and sculpture, and even the labor it takes to construct life-size Pokémon out of Lego bricks. (These displays were also, refreshingly, free of Big Tech sponsorship.) Trucks and bus stops around the city featured Pokémon instead of B2B SaaS platforms with inappropriate names. Oracle Park had a themed night dedicated to the franchise; Embarcadero Plaza played host to three nights of drone shows commemorating our newly Poké-fied SF. Shops and restaurants all over the city sold merch and foodstuffs; the Nintendo Store was packed all weekend.
It was so much fun.
Even Mayor Daniel Lurie understood the appeal of a San Francisco event that caters to someone other than the tech crowd. It’s why he took time out of his day, for better or worse, to schedule and record his meeting with a human-size Pikachu. (It was his most viral video in months, even though, if you squint hard enough, Lurie kind of looks like Giovanni, the head honcho of Team Rocket, that supervillain gang.)
All this is to say: Even if you did not spend your Sunday watching Pokémon trainers competing against one another to be declared the best there ever was, like thousands of nerds (myself included) at Chase Center and Moscone Center, it was nice to be transported to a downtown San Francisco that didn’t rely so heavily on oodles of venture capital to be so back.
