Remembering the 1999 Burger King Pokémon Gold Trading Cards

Get ready for your social media feeds to be bombarded with Pokémon Trading Card Game fans and resellers buying up Happy Meals all over the country, as news of the latest collaboration between McDonald’s and The Pokémon Company is pointing towards a late 2026 release. As the 30th anniversary celebration of the iconic franchise continues, any drop that has included the cards has been the source of a lot of joy and frustration in the trading card community. Despite reportedly having the largest print run of any Pokémon TCG, supply has yet to meet demand, and the abundance of cards being made has caused printing errors to become even more popular than the short prints in the set.

While Pokémon and McDonald’s have been teaming up to release promo cards for the TCG along with Happy Meals since 2002, the honor of the first Pokémon cards of the non-TCG variety to release alongside a fast food franchise’s kids meals was a collaboration with Burger King in late 1999.

What was Included in the Burger King Pokémon Kids Meal?

The promotion ran from November to December 1999 to promote Pokémon: The First Movie. Inside each Kid’s Meal was one of 57 different toys and one of 151 cards representing the Pokémon that were known at the time. The toys ranged from keychains to beanbags to light-up figures. With a slightly altered tagline of “Gotta catch ‘em here!”, kids were on a chase to get as many toys and cards as they could at the time. Locations that sold out of the toys and cards resorted to handing out uncut sheets of nine cards as a replacement. Kids who wanted the toys were probably disappointed, but for the card collectors, life got a little bit easier as they were now getting nine cards instead of one.

Because the cards were mass-produced and lacked a connection to the TCG, their values nearly 30 years later have not reached the same heights. Individual sheets can be purchased on different platforms for anywhere from $4 to $60, depending on the condition and the characters featured. Graded copies of individual cards are rare relative to the TCG because of their lack of popularity and condition-sensitive nature due to the perforations.

How Could You Get the Pokémon Gold Cards?

Released a week after the start of the promotion, kids could also buy one of six 23-karat gold-plated cards for $1.99 each with the purchase of a Kid’s Meal. Housed inside a plastic case that came with a shiny Pokéball, a red or blue box, and a certificate of authenticity from then-Nintendo Chairman Howard Lincoln, the presentation of the gold cards felt premium and a clear step above the cards included in the kids meal. The checklist of six cards meant that the set was relatively easy to complete and featured the most popular characters at the time, like Pikachu, Mewtwo, and Charizard. To the shock of absolutely no one who has followed the success of the TCG over the years, the gold card kids wanted the most was Charizard, with everybody else fighting for second.

Like the cards included in the Kids Meals, the value of the gold cards in ungraded form has not funded a lot of retirements. Complete sets can be bought for between $150 to $200 online, with a little bit of a premium for cards that come with the boxes and the Pokéballs in good condition. However, graded copies of the gold cards are quite popular as thousands of examples have been sent to PSA. While the Charizard gold cards in a PSA 9 have recently started to pick up in value, there is no PSA 10 copy as of this post. It’s safe to say that whoever lucks out and finds the Gem Mint copy will attract a lot of attention from very interested buyers.

So Burger King Missed Out on the Pokémon TCG?

Nope. In 2008 and 2009, Burger King and Pokémon would revisit the toy and card combo with their Kids Meals, but this time they would include promo cards for the Diamond and Pearl and Platinum expansions. The only way to tell the difference between the cards included in packs and the cards included in the Kids Meals was the inclusion of a Diamond and Pearl or Platinum logo on the lower right corner of the card art. Not surprisingly, PSA 10 copies of these promo cards are selling for thousands of dollars as Gem Mint examples are not easy to come by. Why? Because most kids during that time were still doing what they were supposed to do with the cards: play with them, trade them with their friends, or throw them in the trash because they preferred the toy.

Juan Martinez

From video game journalism to veteran of the sneaker blog era to podcasting about well, everything, Juan is smiling through it all and can't believe this is his life. His current hot take is that people are really underrating the Psyduck trading card market. Email: juan@soleretriever.com Instagram | Twitter | Bluesky | Threads : @ezyville