As a boy in Machida, on the western edge of Tokyo, Satoshi Tajiri hunted insects so keenly that, his father later told TIME, the other children called him “Dr Bug”. “Every time I found a new insect, it was mysterious to me. And the more I searched for insects, the more I found,” he said. By the time he was a teenager the fields were being built over and he had moved on to the arcades, where he started a hand-written magazine about games. That magazine, Game Freak, became the name of his company, and the collector’s pleasure of finding, keeping and swapping became Pocket Monsters, the Game Boy game known in English as Pokémon.
Fast facts
- Born: 1965, and grew up in Machida, a suburb of Tokyo.
- Fanzine: Game Freak, from 1983.
- Company: Game Freak, founded on 26 April 1989, with Tajiri as president.
- Best known for: Pocket Monsters Red and Green (1996), released in English as Pokémon Red & Blue.
- Earlier games: Quinty (1989, called Mendel Palace in America) and Yoshi (1991).
Dr Bug
Tajiri’s childhood hobby is the best-known part of his story, and he explained it himself in a rare interview with TIME in 1999. “They fascinated me. For one thing, they kind of moved funny. They were odd.” He worked out his own methods: other children caught beetles with honey smeared on bark, but he put a stone under a tree, because beetles slept under stones during the day, and lifted it in the morning. “None of my friends would do what I did. I got more insects than anyone.” When TIME asked whether Pokémon came from this, he agreed, and pointed at what had changed: “Places to catch insects are rare because of urbanization. Kids play inside their homes now.”
Game Freak, the magazine
“I was really into Space Invaders in about 1978,” Tajiri said. “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 he was 17, and describes it as a guide to improving scores on arcade games such as Namco’s Xevious and Mappy; Edge adds that it published tips for Shigeru Miyamoto’s games, such as Donkey Kong. Tajiri’s best seller was a special issue on Xevious: “We sold 10,000 copies.” The magazine brought him the artist Ken Sugimori and the designer and composer Junichi Masuda, who would build the company with him.
He was making games as well as writing about them. “When I was 16, I won a contest Sega was sponsoring for a game idea,” he told TIME. He learned to program by taking a Nintendo console apart “to see how it worked”: “It took me two years to learn the programming, and a year to make my first game.”
Game Freak, the company
That first game was Quinty, a single-screen action game in which the player flips floor tiles to knock enemies over. Namco published it on the Famicom in 1989, the year Tajiri turned the magazine into a company; Wireframe suggests that his years of writing about Namco’s arcade games helped get him through the door. Hudson Soft released it in America as Mendel Palace. Game Freak then made games for whoever would publish them, among them Jerry Boy for Sony, Pulseman for Sega and Yoshi, a falling-block puzzle game for Nintendo that Wireframe says Tajiri programmed in six months and that “paved the way for Pokémon”.
Pocket Monsters
Tajiri had the idea for Pokémon in 1990, according to TIME. Two things set it off. In a 2004 interview on the Japanese television programme Game Center CX, quoted by Wireframe, he said that 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 other was the Game Boy’s link cable. “In Tetris — its first game — 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. It wasn’t about competition.”
Nintendo was unsure. “I was told they couldn’t really understand the concept of the game,” Tajiri said, and by the time it was finished, “Game Boy’s popularity was declining.” Miyamoto advised him throughout. “I really look up to Miyamoto-san,” Tajiri told TIME. “I’d memorize each piece of advice he gave.” In the Japanese game the player’s character is named Satoshi, after Tajiri, and his rival Shigeru, after Miyamoto; Edge read that as the younger designer following in the older one’s footsteps.
The work took about six years. Pocket Monsters Red and Green came out in Japan on 27 February 1996, each with a slightly different set of monsters, so that no one could collect them all without trading with a friend over the cable. Retro Gamer put their sales in Japan at 10.23 million, almost four million more than the previous record holder, Super Mario Bros. The games, the television series and the trading cards that followed made Pokémon a worldwide craze from 1998 (see the Pokémon phenomenon); the Pokémon comic that Nintendo Power serialised in 1999 carried the credit “Based on a story by Satoshi Tajiri”.
After Red and Green
Tajiri has stayed at the head of Game Freak, which has made every main-series Pokémon game since, and has given very few interviews. In July 2005 Electronic Gaming Monthly placed him ninth in its list of the most influential people in the games industry: “It was 1996, and Nintendo’s Game Boy was starting to run out of steam. Along came Satoshi Tajiri and 151 of his closest friends.”
Sources
- “The Ultimate Game Freak”, TIME Asia, 22 November 1999 (web, secondary): his age, Machida, “Dr Bug”, the insects, Space Invaders and the magazine, the Xevious issue, the Sega contest, learning to program and Quinty, the idea in 1990 and six years’ work, the link cable, Nintendo’s doubts, Miyamoto. https://time.com/archive/6951818/the-ultimate-game-freak/
- Retro Gamer issue 33, 2006, pp. 44–49, Pokémon Red and Blue feature: “Dr Bug”, the beetles and the stone, the TIME interview, Miyamoto, Satoshi and Shigeru, six years, the release date and 10.23 million sales in Japan; “one of only about three interviews” Tajiri had given.
- Wireframe issue 15, May 2019, pp. 50–53, “Developer Profile: Game Freak”: the fanzine in 1983 at 17, Xevious and Mappy, Sugimori and Masuda, Namco and Mendel Palace, the Sega award, the games for Sony, Nintendo and Sega, Yoshi in six months, the Dragon Quest II story from Game Center CX (2004), six years’ development.
- Edge issue 127, September 2003: Satoshi and Shigeru; the fanzine’s tips for Miyamoto’s games.
- Nintendo Power issue 125, October 1999, and issue 126, November 1999: the Pokémon comic, “based on a story by Satoshi Tajiri”.
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 193, July 2005, p. 56: “Most influential” people, Tajiri ninth.
- Game Freak, company profile (web): founded 26 April 1989; Tajiri as representative director. https://www.gamefreak.co.jp/company/about/
- Japanese Wikipedia, “田尻智” (web, secondary): date of birth. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/田尻智