I had hoped to get one of the creations of today’s birthday celebrant to narrate this piece, but unfortunately, even after running it through Google Translate, all I got was “Pika! Pika! Pika!” (and so forth). So I’ll have to do it myself. Today is the 58th birthday of the creator of Pokémon: Satoshi Tajiri.
Tajiri was born in a part of Tokyo that, at the time, had a somewhat rural atmosphere, and his hobby as a boy was collecting insects. Apparently he was so interested in insects that the other kinds called him “Dr. Bug,” and his early ambition was to become an entomologist. But as Tokyo grew, his environment became more and more urban, and had fewer and fewer insects. Possibly as a result, he became deeply involved in arcade games as a teenager. His parents considered him a delinquent, but he kept at it — especially Dig Dug. He played video games so much that he cut classes and had to attend makeup sessions to graduate from high school.
Instead of attending a 4-year college, Tajiri enrolled in a 2-year technical program in electronics and computer science. But he stayed interested in video games, and started a magazine, Game Freak. It offered winning strategies and easter eggs in popular games, and the most popular issues sold over 10,000 copies. One of his readers, Ken Sugimori, became the magazine’s illustrator — and later, the artist behind all the original Pokémon creatures.
After being exposed to so many video games, Tajiri came to a (possibly inevitable) conclusion: most of them weren’t very good. So he and Sugimori decided to turn Game Freak from a magazine into a game development company. He learned BASIC programming, and Game Freak pitched their first game, Quinty, to Namco in 1989 — and it sold.
The next year Tajiri saw a Nintendo Game Boy. One handheld console could be connected via a cable to another, and that gave Tajiri the idea for Pokémon. He pitched the idea to Nintendo, who didn’t quite understand what he was talking about, but thought it sounded promising enough that one of their top designers, Shigeru Miyamoto, started meeting with Tajiri to help him develop his idea. One of Tajiri’s innovations was that the creatures in Pokémon just faint when they lose a battle; he thought it was a bad idea for children to equate death with losing a game. It took six years and nearly bankrupted Game Freak, but the game was finally finished — but it ran on the Game Boy platform, which gamers were beginning to consider old and obsolete. To Nintendo’s surprise, though, Pokémon became fairly popular — and then immensely popular.
Tajiri still works on games — now he’s more of an executive producer — and also keeps the irregular hours he adopted early in his career. He often works for 24 hours straight, then rests for 12 hours. At this point there are 25 different Pokémon games, a Pokémon movie (Detective Pikachu) and The Economist has labeled Pokémon “Japan’s most successful export.” Even given all that, though, all Pikachu still has to say is Pika! Pika! Pika!
