Ken Sugimori met Satoshi Tajiri through the post. As a schoolboy he found a copy of Tajiri’s hand-made games fanzine, Game Freak, in a second-hand bookshop in Shinjuku that sold self-published magazines. It had printed the secret characters hidden in Namco’s arcade shooter Xevious, and Sugimori wrote in. The letters went back and forth, Sugimori sending reports on arcade games that even Tajiri had not heard of, and he became the fanzine’s illustrator. By 1996 the two of them had made Pocket Monsters, and Sugimori had drawn many of its monsters.
Fast facts
- Born: 1966.
- Company: Game Freak, from the fanzine to the development company founded in 1989; a member of its board.
- First game: Quinty (Famicom, 1989), called Mendel Palace in America.
- As director: Magical Taruruuto-kun (1992) and Pulseman (1994) for the Mega Drive.
- Pokémon: designed many of the monsters of Pocket Monsters Red and Green (1996).
From fanzine to studio
Wireframe, profiling Game Freak in 2019, described the fanzine as the thing that “cemented Tajiri’s working relationship with the collaborators who’d later help evolve Game Freak into a development studio”, naming Sugimori, the “artist and longtime friend”, first among them. When the fanzine became a games developer in 1989, its first game was Quinty, a single-screen action puzzle in which the player flips floor tiles to knock enemies over. The magazine called it “the first game from Satoshi Tajiri and artist Ken Sugimori”, and credited its charm “in no small part to Sugimori’s spiky, distinctive artwork, which was already in evidence at this early stage.”
Sugimori also turns up in the origin story of Pokémon itself. In a 2004 television interview quoted by Wireframe, Tajiri said the idea grew partly out of frustration with Dragon Quest II: Sugimori’s copy had two of an item Tajiri needed, and there was no way to pass one across.
Mega Drive
Before Pokémon, Game Freak made games for other publishers, and Sugimori directed two of them for Sega’s Mega Drive. Magical Taruruuto-kun (1992) was a platform game based on a manga and anime series. Pulseman (1994), released only in Japan, starred a half-human, half-robot hero who could dash through electrical cables. Retro Gamer later called it “one of the better platform games to come out of that epoch”, and credited it to “Game Freak… and, most notably, Pokémon designer Ken Sugimori”.
Pocket Monsters
Pocket Monsters Red and Green took about six years to make. “We started the project right after Quinty was released and initially, we were aiming to have about fifty Pokémon,” Sugimori told Retro Gamer. “But every year, the technology improved so while it started at 50, by the end of about the fourth year we realised that we could do about 150 Pokémon. In that sense, I suppose we didn’t really have a set target number.” The finished game had 151.
He was not the only designer. Other Game Freak artists, among them Atsuko Nishida and Motofumi Fujiwara, designed some of the first monsters, and Wireframe puts it carefully: Sugimori “would create many of the Pokémon designs for the early games”. He put the series’ appeal down to readable design: “it’s easy to understand and it has incredible diversity”. The characters in the cartoons and films “are based on the ones we create for the games and through its features, its abilities and its shape, you can quite easily get an idea of what kind of Pokémon it is. There’s a great mix of cool and cute monsters, making it easy for the audience to pick their own favourite.”
He has stayed at Game Freak since, and sits on its board. When a Japanese games site brought him, Tajiri and the creator of Xevious, Masanobu Endo, together in 2016, it introduced him as a director of Game Freak and one of its founding members, responsible for the character design of the Pocket Monsters series.
Sources
- Wireframe, issue 15 (May 2019), pp. 50–53, “Developer Profile: Game Freak”: the fanzine and Sugimori as “artist and longtime friend”; Quinty and his artwork; the Dragon Quest II story from Game Center CX (2004); “many of the Pokémon designs for the early games”; Magical Taruruuto-kun (1992) and Pulseman (1994).
- “「ゼビウス」がなければ「ポケモン」は生まれなかった！？”, Denfaminico Gamer, 8 February 2016 (web, in Japanese): conversation between Masanobu Endo, Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori (the Shinjuku bookshop, the Xevious letter, his arcade reports; introduced as 株式会社ゲームフリーク取締役, a board director, and a founding member). https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/projectbook/xevious
- Retro Gamer, 100 Retro Games to Play Before You Die (bookazine), entry 58, Pokémon Red & Blue: interview with Ken Sugimori and Junichi Masuda (six years, 50 to 150 Pokémon, types, the series’ appeal).
- Retro Gamer Collection, volume 5 (2011): Pulseman and “Pokémon designer Ken Sugimori”.
- Sega Retro, “Ken Sugimori” (web, secondary): direction of Magical Taruruto-kun and Pulseman, from their credits. https://segaretro.org/Ken_Sugimori
- Wikipedia, “Ken Sugimori” (web, secondary): date of birth; the other designers of the first Pokémon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Sugimori