Have you heard of the “Virtual Soldier Porygon”? In 1997, this episode of the Pokémon series caused epileptic seizures and fainting in many Japanese viewers.
It is December 16, 1997. It is 6:30 p.m. And in Japan, in many medical emergency services, the telephone starts ringing: throughout the country, at the same time, there are reports of several hundred epileptic seizures, fainting spells or temporary blindness in young children.
What did the patients have in common? They were all in front of their television screens when they developed their symptoms, watching episode 38 of the Pokémon animated series.
The virtual soldier Porygon
A famous video game franchise available in multiple formats, the license created in 1995 by Satoshi Tajiri has been talked about on many occasions. But this event, at the very least undesirable, is undoubtedly one of the least glorious stories told about it.
Titled “The Virtual Soldier Porygon”, the episode in question followed a new adventure of Ash, Brock and Misty. The three young protagonists of the animated series had to infiltrate a computer system (Tron style) this time to stop Team Rocket.
It was at the twentieth minute of the episode, when Pikachu caused a huge electrical explosion, that things got seriously messed up, and many flashes of color followed one another on the screen in a stroboscopic manner, increasing the number of images broadcast per second from 3 to 10. according to a study.
TV Tokyo
700 children in emergency rooms
The result: nearly 700 Japanese children taken to emergency rooms (and 208 of them hospitalized), according to a magazine article Science and Life Junior published at the time. But in all, around 12,000 children were affected in one way or another by the images of the episode, according to information from a recent article in Slate (although the possibility of collective hysteria has also been raised to explain the scale of the phenomenon).
This terrible accident, mentioned by the Guinness Book as having the record for epileptic seizures caused by a television show, led to a 4-month suspension of the series in Japan, and outright censorship of the famous episode in France and other countries around the world.