If a boy enjoys insect collecting and wants to become an entomologist, but the town where he grew up gets engulfed by an expanding city, much of it is paved, and the habitats where he hunted bugs disappear, what can he do?
In the case of Satoshi Tajiri, who was born August 28, 1965 near Tokyo, you might first get interested in video games. That’s what Tajiri did, probably to excess — he was so deeply into video games that he had to take night classes to eventually earn his high school diploma. After that he decided not to attend any university, instead enrolling in a two-year electronics program at the Tokyo College of Technology.
In the early 1980s he got a Nintendo game console — in Japan it was called the Famicon, and in the US it was the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES. He played it for a while, but then took it apart to see how it worked. At about the same time he was starting to work on his own games, and won a contest by submitting a game idea to Sega. He also founded a fan magazine called Game Freak — it was hand written and manually stapled together but sold up to 10,000 copies per issue. He met Ken Sugimori, who shared his interests, and who became the magazine’s illustrator. By about 1988 they decided that the games they were reviewing in the magazine just weren’t good enough, so they morphed Game Freak magazine into Game Freak, Inc. and started designing their own games. They sold their very first one to Namco, which published it as Quinty.
By 1990 the Nintendo Game Boy appeared, and Tajiri found you could link two of them with a cable. That, he says, reminded him of his boyhood hobby of collecting insects, and he imagined bugs crawling back and forth between the two handheld units, with each player trying to collect them. He pitched his idea to Nintendo, but they didn’t understand it. Still, by then Tajiri had a good reputation as a game designer, so they decided to let him try it. They wrote a contract with Game Freak to develop the idea.
Development was more difficult than Tajiri, or probably anyone, expected. It took six years and nearly bankrupted the company. Tajiri didn’t take a salary at all, and several employees quit when their salary checks were late. The company was saved by an investment from Creatures, Inc., and Tajiri finished his game. It was called Pokémon Rad and Green, and it was, as they say, relatively successful. Where “relatively successful” means “launched a multibillion dollar international media empire that’s still thriving.”
Tajiri’s games don’t share some of the tropes that you find in nearly all others. He believes that it’s unhealthy for children to equate losing a game with death, so Pokémon creatures don’t die; they just faint. And he hid some creatures in the games. The first one was Mew, which even Nintendo didn’t know about. It was never marketed, and you had to do some very outside-the-box stuff as a player to find it. But a few players did, and then the rumors about it propelled sales even more than before. Tajiri just kept on working on game development, and in that he was also unusual — his work schedule often involves 24-hour sessions, after which he takes nearly as much time off.
Tajiri still works on Pokémon projects, now including games, films, and other franchise products, as well as directing and producing other Game Freak and Nintendo titles. Today’s his 59th birthday. There are a lot more Pokémon games than you might think (unless you’re a fan) — gotta catch ‘em all!
