A stuffed Pikachu in a custom white suit spent 67 days aboard the International Space Station this spring, riding a cargo ship up on April 11 and coming home on another cargo ship on June 17. In that stretch the plush completed about 1,040 loops around Earth, a full circuit every 90 minutes or so, the same pace the station keeps. ESA and The Pokémon Company International kept the flight quiet until September 19, then used the yellow visitor as the opening note for World Space Week.
NOT A HOTEL and Pokémon Sleep have set a glossy red and white sphere on a wooded lakeshore in Tomakomai, Hokkaido, about an hour south of Sapporo, and opened it for a short run of overnight stays. The guest room is a three meter sphere, close to ten feet across, formed from two molded acrylic hemispheres so the finished object reads as a life size Poké Ball sitting among trees with lake water just beyond the glass. Promotional nights run in brief windows from October 8 through 18, 2026, timed to the franchise’s 30th year and the third anniversary of the Pokémon Sleep app.
Two years after a single developer launched a fake card shop on Steam, TCG Card Shop Simulator has exited Early Access, with a 1.0 build now available for PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5, Switch, and Switch 2. Ding Shen Sia of OPNeon Games began the project after burning out on mobile work in 2023, expecting that Steam Trading Cards would be enough of an incentive to ship. The store sold 100,000 copies in three days and eventually surpassed four million players.
Seven years after Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle left theaters in Japan and later arrived on Netflix, a new feature-length animated film is finally on the calendar. Pokémon: Wild Card was unveiled August 30, 2026, during the closing ceremony of the Pokémon World Championships at Chase Center in San Francisco, then confirmed on Pokémon.com the same weekend.
Google and The Pokémon Company spent Pokémon’s 30th anniversary year pairing a screenless fitness band with the one app that already treats sleep like a daily hunt. Fitbit Air Special Edition Pokémon Sleep arrived this morning as a $129.99 US / ¥19,800 Japan exclusive, limited to those two countries and rated for ages 13 and up. Preorders opened today at the Google Store and Target, with shipments starting September 15.
A fresh unofficial recreation of Pokemon Gold now runs natively on Windows, Mac, Linux, and other platforms, and the timing feels right for anyone who still carries those early Johto memories. Built by bryanthaboi and a growing group of contributors under the gen1recomp project, the latest builds bring the Game Boy Color classic into a modern framework that already handled Red, Blue, and Yellow. Players supply their own verified US Gold ROM, the software extracts the data, and the game launches without any original Nintendo code in the mix.
Kiara from Kiara’s Workshop has a habit of pulling game mechanics into the physical world and making them work. Her newest project targets the catch sequence unique to Pokémon Legends: Arceus. In that older setting a successful capture does not produce the familiar series of rapid shakes. The ball instead rises once into the air while a burst of smoke escapes from the top. A failure simply opens the shell and plays a short sound.
Wakura Onsen has introduced a new attraction that mixes traditional hot spring relaxation with some familiar Pokemon characters. This brand-new Pokemon Footbath is located in Yuttari Park on the Noto Peninsula, specifically in Nanao City, and was just opened just a stone’s throw away from the Nanao Bay beach.
LEGO has teamed up with The Pokemon Company for a fresh wave of sets that add real-time reactions to classic construction play. Twelve new SMART Play sets go on pre-order today and reach stores August 1, 2026. The line mixes brick-built Pokemon figures with a special hub brick that reads tags hidden in the models and responds with lights and sounds tailored to whatever scene a builder creates.
