Game Freak was a magazine before it was a company. As a teenager, Satoshi Tajiri spent his time in the arcades, and he found nothing to read about the games he played. “I was really into Space Invaders in about 1978,” he told TIME in 1999. “There wasn’t any media to get information about games, so I came up with Game Freak magazine. It was handwritten. I stapled the pages together.” Wireframe dates the first issue to 1983, when Tajiri was 17, and describes it as a guide for arcade players to improving their scores on games such as Namco’s Xevious and Mappy.
The fanzine brought Tajiri the people who would run the studio with him: the artist Ken Sugimori and the designer and composer Junichi Masuda. Six years after the magazine began, it became a games developer. Seven years after that, Game Freak released Pocket Monsters for Nintendo’s Game Boy, and it has made the main Pokémon games ever since.
Fast facts
- Fanzine: Game Freak, hand-written by Satoshi Tajiri, from 1983.
- Company founded: 26 April 1989, with Tajiri as president.
- First game: Quinty (Namco, Famicom, 1989), called Mendel Palace in America.
- Best known for: Pokémon, from Pocket Monsters Red and Green (1996) onwards.
- Pokémon’s owners: Nintendo, Creatures and Game Freak, through The Pokémon Company.
Quinty and the games for hire
Tajiri had written about Namco’s arcade games for years, and Wireframe suggests that this is why Namco agreed to publish his first game rather than turn him away. Quinty, company and game both launched in 1989, is a single-screen action game in which the player flips over giant floor tiles to knock enemies off them. It already had Sugimori’s spiky, characterful artwork. Hudson Soft published it in America as Mendel Palace, and Nintendo Power’s ratings chart in November 1990 listed it as a one-player “Action Puzzle” from Hudson.
The small company then made games for whoever would publish them:
| Game | Year | System | Publisher |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quinty (Mendel Palace) | 1989 | Famicom / NES | Namco; Hudson Soft in America |
| Jerry Boy (Smart Ball) | 1991 | Super Famicom / SNES | Sony |
| Yoshi (Yoshi’s Egg) | 1991 | NES, Game Boy | Nintendo |
| Magical Taruruuto-kun | 1992 | Mega Drive | Sega |
| Mario & Wario | 1993 | Super Famicom | Nintendo |
| Pulseman | 1994 | Mega Drive | Sega |
Wireframe reports that Tajiri programmed Yoshi, a falling-block puzzle game, for Nintendo in six months, and that its success “paved the way for Pokémon”. Mario & Wario, played with the Super Famicom mouse, never left Japan. Pulseman, a fast platform game in the style of Mega Man for Sega, is the pre-Pokémon game Wireframe rates highest.
Pocket Monsters
The idea behind Pokémon came from three places. As a child Tajiri collected insects so keenly that, Retro Gamer reports, schoolfriends called him “Dr Bug”. In a 2004 television interview quoted by Wireframe, he said that playing Dragon Quest II had frustrated him: Sugimori’s copy had two of an item Tajiri needed, and there was no way to pass one across. The third was the Game Boy’s link cable. “In Tetris… the cable transmitted information about moving blocks,” he told TIME. “I thought of actual living organisms moving back and forth across the cable. But everyone was using it to compete. The idea I had was for information to go back and forth.” Looking back in 2010, Edge wrote that Game Freak “took a piece of technology that had exclusively been used for competition and made it about communication instead”.
Nintendo was not sure about it. “I was told they couldn’t really understand the concept of the game,” Tajiri said, and by the time the game was finished, “Game Boy’s popularity was declining.” Retro Gamer describes Shigeru Miyamoto as his mentor during development; the hero of the Japanese game is named Satoshi, after Tajiri, and his rival Shigeru.
The work took about six years. Pocket Monsters Red and Pocket Monsters Green came out in Japan on 27 February 1996. Each cartridge held a slightly different set of monsters, so no one could collect them all without trading with a friend over the cable. Retro Gamer put their combined sales in Japan at 10.23 million, beating the record set by Super Mario Bros. by almost four million. The games reached America as Pokémon Red and Blue at the end of September 1998, when Nintendo Power’s adverts told readers to “use your Game Boy link cable and hook up with a friend”, and Europe in 1999. The copyright line on those adverts named three companies: “Nintendo/Creatures, Inc./Game Freak, Inc.”
The same three founded Pokémon Center Co. in 1998, which was renamed The Pokémon Company in 2000. In The Pokémon Company’s own description, Nintendo makes and sells the games, Creatures develops the trading card game and the 3D models, and Game Freak does the “original planning and game development”. By 2006, Retro Gamer reported, Pokémon games had sold over 143 million copies, second only to Mario among game series.
After Red and Green
Pokémon Gold and Silver followed, adding breeding and a day-and-night cycle, and Game Freak has made every main-series game since: Sword and Shield in 2019, Pokémon Legends: Arceus and Scarlet and Violet in 2022, and Pokémon Legends: Z-A in 2025.
Alongside Pokémon it still makes smaller games. Drill Dozer (2005) on the Game Boy Advance starred a girl who drills through walls in a small mech. Around 2012 the company started the Gear Project, in which any employee can pitch an idea; the director Masayuki Onoue told Wireframe that “there are no restrictions in terms of type of game, small or big, or the choice of platform to work on.” It produced the rhythm game HarmoKnight (2012), Tembo the Badass Elephant (2015), Pocket Card Jockey (2016), a cross between horse racing and patience, the puzzle platformer Giga Wrecker (2017) and the Switch role-playing game Little Town Hero (2019).
In October 2024 Game Freak announced that someone had broken into its servers that August and taken the names and company email addresses of 2,606 current and former staff and contractors. At the same time, material said to be unreleased Pokémon designs and plans circulated online; Game Freak did not say whether the two were connected.
Sources
- “The Ultimate Game Freak”, TIME Asia, 22 November 1999 (web, secondary): Tajiri’s interview, quoted here via Retro Gamer; Space Invaders and the hand-written magazine; the link cable; Nintendo’s doubts; about six years’ work. https://time.com/archive/6951818/the-ultimate-game-freak/
- Wireframe issue 15, May 2019, pp. 50–53, “Developer Profile: Game Freak”: the fanzine in 1983 and its subjects; Sugimori and Masuda; Namco and Mendel Palace; the games for Sony, Nintendo and Sega; Yoshi in six months; the Dragon Quest II story from Game Center CX (2004); six years’ development; Drill Dozer, the Gear Project, HarmoKnight, Tembo, Pocket Card Jockey and Giga Wrecker; Masayuki Onoue.
- Retro Gamer issue 33, 2006, pp. 44–49, Pokémon Red and Blue feature: the 27 February 1996 release; “Dr Bug”; the TIME interview; Miyamoto; Satoshi and Shigeru; six years; 10.23 million in Japan; the American and European releases; Gold and Silver; 143 million sales.
- Nintendo Power issue 18, November 1990, p. 87: ratings chart, Mendel Palace (Hudson, one player, action puzzle).
- Nintendo Power issue 113, October 1998: Pokémon adverts (“Available 9/30”), with the Nintendo, Creatures and Game Freak copyright line.
- Edge issue 214, May 2010, pp. 108–109: Game Freak turning the link cable from competition to communication.
- Game Freak, company profile (web): the founding date and president. https://www.gamefreak.co.jp/company/about/
- The Pokémon Company, corporate history (web): the February 1996 release, Pokémon Center Co. in 1998, the 2000 renaming, the three companies’ roles, and the games from 2019 to 2025. https://corporate.pokemon.co.jp/en/aboutus/history/
- Wikipedia, “Game Freak”, and Japanese Wikipedia, “ゲームフリーク” (web, secondary): the fanzine year; the systems and years of Yoshi, Jerry Boy, Magical Taruruuto-kun, Pulseman and Tembo; the release of Little Town Hero in 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Freak
- ITmedia News, 13 October 2024 (web, secondary): Game Freak’s announcement of 10 October 2024 on the server break-in and the separate claimed leaks. https://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/2410/13/news077.html