Pokemon Red came out in 1996. If you were 10 back then, you’re now 34-35. Plenty of senior engineers out there who played pokemon in their youth (and potentially kept playing after that)

I dont know. However, you can see from the following:-

Publishers: "Nintendo, Game Freak, The Pokémon Company", American_Publisher: "Pokémon", Japanese_Publisher: "Pocket Monster", Chinese_Whisper: "big data". Sources: memory, Wikipedia entry.

Something is incorrect here.

I’m thinking maybe something like the Jirachi pokemon got the ball rolling, though I’m not sure I’d call Jira/Atlassian “Big Data”.

I think it grew from https://xkcd.com/178/ originally.