Machida and the insects
Satoshi Tajiri was born in 1965 in Machida, a city on Tokyo's western edge that was, in Tajiri's childhood, surrounded by rice paddies, streams, and forest that were progressively built over through the 1970s as Tokyo's expansion continued. The childhood Tajiri spent collecting insects — catching beetles, dragonflies, and aquatic larvae from the streams near his home — was available to children in Machida through the mid-1970s and largely unavailable by the early 1980s, as development replaced the natural environments where insects lived. Tajiri has described his childhood entomology as the formative experience of his life and the direct origin of Pokémon's collecting structure: a game that would give urban children access to the experience of discovery and collection that his own childhood had provided before the fields around Machida disappeared.
Tajiri was, by his own account, a poor student with an obsessive focus on the things that interested him and difficulty maintaining attention on things that didn't. Video games replaced insect collecting in his attention through the late 1970s, as Tajiri spent more time at Machida's game centres than at school. He taught himself electronics from repair manuals, wrote a fanzine called Game Freak covering the game centre scene from 1981, and founded Game Freak — first as a self-publishing venture, then as a game development company — with artist Ken Sugimori in 1989. The team's first game, Quinty (published by Namco in 1989), demonstrated technical competence without establishing Game Freak as a distinctive creative voice. Yoshi (1991) and Mario & Wario (1993) were work-for-hire projects for Nintendo that provided revenue while Tajiri developed the game he had been planning since the late 1980s.
Six years to Pokémon
The development of Pocket Monsters — Pokémon — took six years. Tajiri's original pitch to Nintendo in 1989 was for a game in which creatures could be captured, collected, and traded between players through the Game Boy Link Cable — the cable that connected two Game Boys for competitive play in games like Tetris. The Link Cable was the game's central mechanic before any of the other design decisions were made: the social interaction of trading, the asymmetry between players who had caught different creatures, and the community that would form around finding and exchanging rare Pokémon were the game's design concept. The creature collecting and battling were the structure built around the trading mechanic, not the other way around.
Nintendo's internal response to the pitch was sceptical. The handheld game market was considered secondary to the home console market; a Game Boy game requiring two systems and a cable for its core social mechanic was an unusual commercial proposition. Satoshi Tajiri's relationship with Shigeru Miyamoto — who became a mentor and supporter of the Pokémon project after Tajiri's pitch — was significant in keeping the project alive through Nintendo's internal approval process. Miyamoto's advocacy for the game's potential within Nintendo's development hierarchy was, by multiple accounts, the factor that allowed development to continue through years in which the project's commercial viability was uncertain.
The development was sustained under financial conditions that would have ended most projects. Game Freak's team shrank to a skeleton crew at points when funding was insufficient to maintain full staffing; the core developers went without salaries for periods and continued development on personal commitment rather than economic stability. Tajiri himself lived with his parents through much of the development period, directing the game while maintaining no material security. The six years required to complete Pokémon were not six years of normal game production: they were six years of production conducted under conditions that most game developers would have found professionally unsustainable.
The 151 creatures and the design
Pokémon Red and Green launched in Japan on February 27, 1996 — six years after the pitch, five years after the original Game Boy had launched. The 151 original Pokémon — designed primarily by Ken Sugimori, with additional designers joining for the final stretch — were not random. Each creature had visual design coherence with its typing, a name that communicated its nature (in Japanese; the English localisation maintained these associations with different words), and evolutionary connections that gave players who collected a chain of forms a sense of completion that single-creature collection didn't provide. The games shipped as Red and Green — two versions with slight differences in which Pokémon could be caught — ensuring that trading was necessary to complete the 151-creature Pokédex without trading partners.
The version difference was Tajiri's implementation of the asymmetric trading mechanic he had designed the game around in 1989. A player with Pokémon Red could not catch all 151 Pokémon without access to a player with Pokémon Green who was willing to trade the version-exclusive creatures. The design forced social interaction — it made completing the game's core collection objective dependent on relationships with other players — in a way that no single-player game structure could have achieved. The completionist impulse, the social trading economy, and the creature battling system reinforced each other: players battled to level their Pokémon for trade value, traded to fill their Pokédex, and battled with their traded Pokémon to test the teams they had assembled.
What Pokémon became
Pokémon Red and Blue (the Blue version was a revised re-release) sold 31 million copies on Game Boy. The anime series launched in Japan in April 1997 and expanded the franchise into television before the games had reached their peak sales in Japan. The trading card game launched in October 1996 and created a physical card economy that generated hundreds of millions in revenue independent of the video game sales. By 1999, Pokémon was a global media franchise generating approximately $5 billion annually, the largest entertainment franchise of its year, and the Game Boy system seller that extended Nintendo's handheld dominance for another console generation.
Tajiri has continued to oversee Pokémon's direction as a franchise through Game Freak, with decreasing direct design involvement as the franchise's scope expanded beyond what one designer could personally direct. He is described by colleagues as reclusive — rarely giving interviews, uncomfortable with the public attention his creation generates, more interested in game design problems than in franchise management. The mismatch between the scale of what he created and his personal discomfort with that scale's consequences is the irony most noted in accounts of his post-Pokémon life. The child who collected insects in Machida's rice paddies created the highest-grossing entertainment franchise in history partly by trying to preserve an experience he knew was disappearing. The rice paddies around Machida are long gone. The game he made about collecting creatures in them has outlasted everything.