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In September 1998, last year Titanic came out.
Everybody in school had a Digimon (Tamagotchi had been usurped). Furby was competing for attention.
Individual facets of the franchise were a slow rollout. It was not all at once. The games released, time passed, and then the show, time passed, and then the cards. Toys began to trickle very slowy and too late, and they sucked for the first year. Crappy things like a clear bouncy ball with a small Pokemon figure inside, or a Tech Deck with a Pokemon printed on it. The best you could find were cheap plastic clear Masterballs which included a few figures. There were even the anime human characters, but I don't remember if I got those from Japan or the US. In general everything was very cheap at the beginning, except for the figures which were just like the Japanese ones, except packed with cheap extra crap in huge packaging. If you were lucky and had a import store near a big city, you might find a nicer Japanese toy of higher quality. you might find some Japanese cards from a set that wasn't out yet in English.
If something could be sold, it probably had Pokemon on it. I remember Lunchables or jelly jars, lip balm, school supplies, napkins - literally anything. Since there were so few products, and since it was so popular, the demand was much greater than the supply and megacorps jumped on that deficit. Nobody knew Pokemon would become so popular so quickly, before it released they thought it would fail because it was too Japanese.
In the beginning, there were posers who pretended to like Pokemon, especially with cards but didn't know how to play. Or maybe they started Red or Blue but didn't finish the game.
