Insect Collector Turned Game Maker
A Machida boy who caught beetles under stones grew up to direct Pokémon, a Game Boy game in which some creatures could only arrive by cable from a friend.
Game Designer & Game Freak Founder
Satoshi Tajiri grew up catching insects in a Tokyo suburb that was being paved over, wrote a stapled arcade-tips magazine called Game Freak, and turned its circle of friends into a studio. When he saw the Game Boy’s link cable, he imagined living creatures crossing it. Making that idea fit on a cartridge took about six years, a handful of programmers, a patient producer and, at the very end, 300 bytes of spare memory.
Tajiri grew up in Machida, on Tokyo’s western edge. As he described it to TIME in 1999, the area still had rice paddies, rivers and woods, and he was “really interested in collecting insects.” His father told the interviewer that other children called him “Dr. Bug.” Then development arrived: trees came down every year, the insects thinned out, and, in Tajiri’s words, “a fishing pond would become an arcade center.”
What he remembered was a method as much as a hoard. Most children caught beetles by smearing honey on bark. Tajiri noticed that beetles slept under stones by day, so he set a stone beneath a tree and lifted it in the morning. “Tiny discoveries like that made me excited,” he said. He also told TIME that the swirl on the tadpole-like Nyoromo came from remembering how a tadpole’s insides show through its transparent skin.
Pokémon keeps that habit of looking closely. A patch of tall grass is worth walking through because something particular lives there, and knowing where to look is a kind of expertise. Tajiri linked the game to that loss: places to catch insects had become rare, children played indoors, and when he was making games “something clicked.” “Everything I did as a kid is kind of rolled into one—that’s what Pokémon is.”
Space Invaders hooked him around 1978. There was little published information about games, so he made his own: a magazine called Game Freak, handwritten, photocopied and stapled, full of techniques and secret tips. Accounts date its first issue to the early 1980s, variously 1981 or 1983. Its best-selling issue, he told TIME, was a special on Xevious that sold 10,000 copies at 300 yen. “At first I used a photocopy machine—more important than style was selling information.”
Contributors gathered around it. Ken Sugimori, then hoping to become a manga artist, made the magazine with Tajiri; after high school he rented a flat near Tajiri’s home that served for a while as the magazine’s office. Sugimori recalled in 2014 that playing Famicom there and visiting arcades together made the group want to build games themselves. Tajiri put the turn more sharply: “The more I learned about games, the more frustrated I became because the games weren’t very good.”
Neither of them knew how. Sugimori remembered that some of the magazine’s members, a group of programmers in Ehime, said they could analyse anything, including the Famicom. Junichi Masuda, who joined through a friend, recalled studying the console’s chip on an Apple II, which used the same 6502 processor, and poking at it through Nintendo’s Family BASIC keyboard. There were no development kits for outsiders; the first tool was curiosity.
Game Freak’s first game began as someone else’s idea. Sugimori and Masuda recalled in 2014 that a member proposed a 7×5 grid on which the player built a path to guide a walking character to a goal. When that member drifted away, Tajiri restarted the project. He did not much like the original plan, so he kept only the grid of panels and invented a new action around it: flip the tile under an enemy and it tumbles across the room, ideally into a wall. In two-player mode a flip affects your partner too, so the same move can rescue or sabotage.
The circle was about six people, Sugimori estimated: two programmers, a graphics member, Masuda on music and sound effects, Sugimori on the pixel characters, and Tajiri. Masuda composed after his day job as a programmer and brought the data in at weekends. They tested by buying cheap Famicom cartridges, pulling out the chips and soldering in their own. Sugimori remembered cutting and reusing character parts because the cartridge had too little room. Tajiri tuned much of the play and handled every negotiation. Because the group had grown up on Namco’s arcade games, he took Quinty to Namco, which released it in Japan in June 1989.
Tajiri’s own 1999 account emphasises self-reliance: he said he started by taking the Nintendo system apart and spent two years learning programming and one year making the game, without relying on other companies or programmers. His colleagues’ recollections add the people around him. Game Freak was incorporated on 26 April 1989, keeping the magazine’s name. Quinty already favours a single readable verb, a crowded small room and an action that can be used for or against a friend.
The idea arrived with the hardware. Tajiri told TIME that when he saw the Game Boy he was struck by its communication cable. In Tetris it carried information about falling blocks; “I thought of actual living organisms moving back and forth across the cable.” Other games used such links for head-to-head competition. He wanted information to go back and forth. Tsunekazu Ishihara, the project’s producer, told Satoru Iwata in Nintendo’s Iwata Asks interview that planning began in 1990, the year after Game Freak’s founding and the Game Boy’s release.
The design turns that cable into a reason to talk. Wild creatures appear in grass, caves and water; the player weakens one and throws a ball to catch it, then records it in the Pokédex. Red and Green each lack some creatures the other contains, so completing the record means trading with someone. A TIME history published in 2024 reports that Shigeru Miyamoto suggested the two-version split. Tajiri told TIME in 1999 that Pokémon “was made with Miyamoto-san’s advice,” and that he deliberately had defeated monsters faint rather than die; players could also give each creature its own name.
The production was small and long. Shigeki Morimoto, who wrote the battle program, said Game Freak had “only about four programmers” for Red and Green. Ken Sugimori led the character art; Junichi Masuda composed the music and programmed. Ishihara said the games were finished in October 1995, then missed the year-end sales season and came out on 27 February 1996, “the very worst time of year to release games,” on a handheld that seemed near the end of its life. He feared they had dragged the project out so long they would miss the last train. Tajiri remembered that Nintendo “didn’t expect much from the game.”
The last obstacle was memory. Morimoto recalled that the cartridge was full. When the debugging features were stripped out, about 300 bytes came free, and the team slotted in a 151st creature, Mew, even though, as Ishihara reminded him, they had been told not to touch a single bit once debugging ended. It was, Morimoto said, “a prank that everyone right up to Tajiri-san was in on.” A bug let Mew surface in some players’ games; in April 1996 CoroCoro Comic offered it to twenty winners and drew about 78,000 entries, and Ishihara recalled that afterwards weekly sales began to match what had been monthly ones. Tajiri’s 1999 account calls Mew “done on purpose”, a rumour designed to keep interest alive. Both accounts agree that a hidden creature turned the game’s exchange into rumour and trading between friends.
Game Freak began Gold and Silver immediately after Red and Green, aiming for 1998. Morimoto recalled that the team was again tiny and “very greedy” about features. The sequel was interrupted by Pokémon Blue, by Yellow, and by the request to localise the originals for America. Iwata, then president of HAL Laboratory and a Creatures board member, read the Red and Green source code to plan the localisation, ported the battle logic for Nintendo’s Pokémon Stadium, and built tools to compress the Pokémon graphics. Gold and Silver reached Japan on 21 November 1999, three and a half years after work began, with Tajiri directing and Masuda as sub-director.
When TIME met him that month, Tajiri said he had worked on a cycle of 24 hours awake and 12 asleep for three years. By then trading cards, a television series and films were spreading Pokémon far beyond the cartridges, managed largely by Ishihara, whose licensing work led to the founding of The Pokémon Company in 2000. Later generations of the games have been directed by other Game Freak staff; Shigeru Ohmori, for one, joined in 2001 and has directed many of them. Game Freak’s company profile still names Tajiri as representative director.
To follow the original design in the makers’ own words, read the 1999 TIME interview, then the Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver edition of Iwata Asks with Ishihara and Morimoto. Play Red or Green with those accounts in mind and the important moments happen between screens: a creature you cannot find, a friend who has one, the decision to plug in a cable.
1999 · TIME Asia interview by Tim Larimer with Takashi Yokota
Tajiri on Machida’s insects, the handwritten magazine, the link cable as one-to-one communication, Mew, naming and fainting. Archived in two pages; the second continues at pokemon6.fullinterview2.html.Read interviewNintendo · Satoru Iwata with Tsunekazu Ishihara and Shigeki Morimoto
The producer and a programmer of Red and Green recall the 1990 start, the missed release season, about four programmers, Mew in 300 bytes and the long making of Gold and Silver.Read interview2014 · GAME Watch interview with Junichi Masuda and Ken Sugimori · Japanese
The fullest first-hand account of Game Freak before it was a company: the fanzine office, reverse-engineering the Famicom, the six-person Quinty team and Tajiri’s redesign around flipping panels.Read interview
