The Pokémon World Championships will unfold at the Hilton Waikoloa Village Friday through Sunday with nearly 1,000 players, family members, friends, fans, Pokémon Co. International staff and volunteers arriving at the Hawaii island hotel for the event.

Sort of like the Olympics, participants hail from almost 30 countries including the United States, Canada, Japan, Korea, France and Germany, but there’s also at least one contestant from Malta, said J.C. Smith, Pokémon’s consumer marketing director.

For the uninitiated, the pop-culture and merchandising juggernaut known as Pokémon (short for Pocket Monster) started as a video game for the Nintendo Game Boy in Japan in 1996 and arrived in the U.S. two years later. The animated show featuring the cute, silly or kinda-scary-but-not-really creatures, the trading card game with its updated card packs and additional highly anticipated versions of the video game have relentlessly followed.

Surely the Pokémon phenomenon is seen by marketers around the world as an ultimate example of continuously successful branding and merchandising. New players are born each day, and longtime players stick with the game or return to it out of nostalgia.

Hilton Waikoloa Village is having its third turn at hosting the championship since 2007.

"It’s a great experience in Hawaii each time," said Smith. The resort’s family appeal, in addition to the fact that, well, it’s in Hawaii, are reasons the Pokémon Co. chooses to return. It always seeks, first and foremost, locations suitable and enjoyable for families, and "we do have a lot of people request Hawaii repeatedly," he said.

Other locations for the tournament have included San Diego, Orlando, Fla., and Los Angeles "near Disneyland," Smith said.

Lots of people may not know Pikachu from Pichu or Raichu, Jigglypuff from Wigglytuff, or Thundrus from Tornadus, but the 300 contestants and many of their 600 accompanying travelers generally eat, sleep and breathe this stuff — or they wouldn’t be coming here.

It wasn’t so long ago that catching "’em all," as the game encourages players to do, involved only 151 critters. The online Pokédex now sports 646 Pokémon.

Large images of Pokémon festoon the resort’s 66,000-square-foot conference center, said Rodger MacDonald, resort director of marketing. A ton of graphic artwork denotes "the creative rooms, retail components and Pokémon movie and video viewing rooms," he said. "You’ve got this big, beautiful conference center, and everything is adorned with Pokémon paraphernalia — it’s transformed." The tournament will be in the grand ballroom.

Roughly 40 percent of the resort’s occupied rooms will contain a Pokémon-connected guest — and the property has 1,240 rooms, MacDonald said. "We’re a property well suited to manage and handle complex programs, and this is right in our strike zone."

It is understood that the tournament needs to travel, to share the love with other destinations and to keep things interesting for contestants. Nevertheless, "we like to get it back whenever we can … every three to four years, something on that scale, as the rotation allows," said MacDonald.

Pokémon trainers in both the card game and video game competitions will battle to win a trophy, the title of world champion, an invitation to the 2013 Pokémon World Championships and other Poké-swag.

Oh, and there is $100,000 in scholarships to be won as well.

Pokémon enthusiasts and their parents can attend the tournament for free, and those not able to get to the resort can watch online.

The gaming press also will be there to cover the action.

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Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com or on Twitter as @erikaengle.