Pokémon Threw a Rave: Marshmello Played Under a Giant Mewtwo at the Intuit Dome

Pokémon has thrown birthday parties before. It has never thrown one like this.

On Saturday night at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, the franchise closed its 30th anniversary year with Pokémon Night Out — a full-scale EDM arena concert built entirely out of the games, the cards and the creatures. Marshmello headlined. Alison Wonderland opened. And the stage itself was the headline: a video wall big enough to hold a giant Mewtwo looming over the decks, a moon that filled the arena’s sightline, and Pokémon battles playing out at stadium size while the bass did what bass does.

Gotta rave ’em all, indeed.

The show

Alison Wonderland went first, and she played it like a fan, not a booking. Her set counted down through nearly every Pokémon — more than 1,000 species exist now — in front of a wall of game imagery, remixed the classic theme song from the Pokémon TV series, and brought out a neon-covered Pikachu whose glowing glasses and ears changed colour with the set.

The moment the room will talk about longest came from the darkest corner of the original games. Wonderland remixed the theme from Lavender Town — the ghost-filled town from Pokémon Red and Blue that has creeped out a generation of players since the 1990s — over pixelated footage from the original games. It is the eeriest music in the franchise, dropped into a rave, and by every account from the floor it landed like a headline moment, not a novelty.

Marshmello closed the night appearing to float at the centre of the video wall, Pokémon visuals swirling around the booth. The production leaned all the way in: lasers, pyro, and battle footage scaled to arena size, with the crowd lit up below.

Why EDM? Pokémon’s answer

The pairing sounds like a dare until the company explains it. Narbeh Minasians, senior director of brand communications and digital marketing for The Pokémon Company International, told Variety the two fan cultures run on the same fuel: EDM’s four principles — peace, love, unity and respect, PLUR — line up with what Pokémon says its brand is for.

“We have a mission of bringing the world together through Pokémon,” Minasians said. “This seemed like a really natural way to be able to bring those worlds together… We’ve never done anything like this before. This is brand new for us. This is a true celebration of 30 years of our brand, and it’s being done in the most incredible, original fashion that you can imagine.”

Both headliners are fans of the brand themselves, which showed in the setlists: this was not a generic EDM show with a logo on the flyer. The references ran deep — Lavender Town is not a cut you play for casuals.

The franchise at 30

Thirty years after launch, Pokémon is one of the biggest entertainment properties on Earth across games, trading cards, TV and merchandise — big enough that its anniversary celebration is not a retrospective special but an arena show in one of the newest, most high-tech buildings in American sports and entertainment. The Intuit Dome’s halo screen and production rig were practically built for a show whose entire visual language is creatures on a screen.

Fans who were not in Inglewood could watch the event livestreamed online, and the party is not done: a second Pokémon Night Out lands at London’s O2 Arena on November 10.