Pokemon is a media franchise owned by video game giant Nintendo and created by Satoshi Tajiri around 1995. Originally released as a pair of interlinkable Game Boy role-playing video games, Pokemon has since become the 2nd most successful and lucrative video game based media franchise in the world, behind only Nintendo's Mario series. It has been merchandised into anime, manga, trading cards, toys, books, and other media. The concept of the Pokemon universe, in both the video games and the general fictional world of Pokemon, stems from the hobby of insect collecting, while the name Pokemon is the romanized contraction of the Japanese brand Pocket Monsters.