Rattata and the Sticker Card Culture Behind Early Pokemon

Rattata No. 222 — Amada Pokemon Sticker Card, 1997

A Card-Style Sticker from Pokemon’s Earliest Days

This is a single square sticker card manufactured by Amada, a Japanese licensed merchandise maker known throughout the 1990s for producing sticker cards tied to popular anime and manga properties. The format is straightforward: a paper-backed sticker printed with a character illustration, a white border, and — in what makes the Amada Pokemon line distinctive — a set of RPG-style numbers that mimic the layout of a stat card, including a level indicator (LV.4) and numerical values resembling HP or attack figures. It’s the design language of a card game applied to a sticker, and it was entirely characteristic of how Amada packaged these collectibles.

The number 222, printed inside a Pikachu silhouette, is not Rattata’s National Pokedex number — that would be #19. It’s the card’s assigned number within the Amada series itself, a detail that speaks to just how extensive the company’s Pokemon sticker output was during this period. The specific series name and volume cannot be confirmed from the listing alone, but the card clearly belongs to Amada’s early run of Pokemon sticker cards from around 1997.

Rattata and the Franchise Behind It

Pokemon — Pocket Monsters in Japanese — launched on Game Boy in Japan in February 1996, developed by Game Freak and published by Nintendo and Creatures. By April 1997, the anime adaptation was airing on TV Tokyo, following protagonist Ash (Satoshi in Japanese) and his partner Pikachu. The combination of a hit video game and a new animated series triggered what fans and collectors now refer to as Japan’s first Pokemon boom — a period roughly spanning 1996 to 1999 when Pokemon merchandise flooded the domestic market. This sticker card comes from the heart of that era.

Rattata is a Normal-type mouse Pokemon and one of the original 151 introduced in that first generation. It appears early in the games, shows up frequently throughout the anime, and was used by Team Rocket’s James in multiple episodes. It won’t be mistaken for a legendary or a starter, but it is a genuine card-carrying member of the original 151 — and for collectors working toward a complete first-generation set, that’s exactly what matters. Rattata also gained renewed attention in the seventh generation, when an Alolan regional form with a Dark typing was introduced, giving it a continued presence across the long-running series.

Amada and Japan’s Sticker Card Tradition

Japan had a well-established sticker card culture long before Pokemon arrived. The Bikkuri Man series, launched by Lotte in 1987, is widely credited with sparking the modern craze for collectible character stickers, and through the late 1980s and 1990s, virtually every major anime property spawned its own sticker line. Amada — whose full company name is believed to be Amada Insatsu Seihan, though its detailed history isn’t fully documented — was one of the central manufacturers in this space, producing sticker cards for Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, Slam Dunk, and others before taking on Pokemon.

These stickers were sold through candy stores, stationery shops, and toy retailers at prices within a child’s pocket-money budget. The RPG stat design on the Amada Pokemon cards nods to the card game boom running in parallel, offering a lower-priced collecting experience that sat alongside — but was separate from — the official Pokemon Trading Card Game. Because Amada’s Pokemon stickers were made for the Japanese domestic market and predate the franchise’s Western debut in North America in 1998, they represent a snapshot of the original Pokemon phenomenon, made before most of the world had encountered Pikachu.