Satoshi Tajiri
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Satoshi Tajiri (田尻智 Tajiri Satoshi?, born on August 28, 1965) is a Japanese electronic game designer and the creator of Pocket Monsters, better known as Pokémon.
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[edit] Childhood and education
As a young boy, Satoshi lived in a suburb of Tokyo and loved to collect bugs. In the late 1970s, the forests and fields that Satoshi loved as a child were paved over by apartments and parking lots. This saddened Tajiri, as modern kids wouldn't be able to go bug-catching as he did.
[edit] Game Freak
In 1982, Satoshi and his friends James Hanzatko and Yuusuke Santamaria formed a games magazine under the name of Game Freak. One of his Game Freak friends was Ken Sugimori, who drew all of the Pokémon's images. In the early 1980s, he won a contest sponsored by Sega involving making a video game. He later had his first video game, Quinty, published by Namco for the Nintendo Famicom. In 1991, Satoshi discovered the Game Boy. When he first saw Link Cables, he imagined insects creeping along them, and the Pokémon idea was born. The game was given some initial funding and concept work from another game design studio, "Creatures." Tajiri named his development company "Game Freak", after the magazine, and thus it can still be seen at the start of Pokémon games.
[edit] Nintendo
Tajiri went to work for Nintendo and spent the next six years working on Pokémon. He became friends with Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Pikmin, and Donkey Kong, who also became a mentor to Tajiri. As a tribute to Tajiri and Miyamoto, Ash Ketchum (the anime counterpart of "Red" in the games) is named Satoshi and Gary Oak (the anime counterpart of "Blue" in the games) is named Shigeru in the Japanese version of Pokémon.
Most recently, Tajiri (along with Nintendo Co. Ltd. president Satoru Iwata) served as an executive producer for the Game Boy Advance game ScrewBreaker (スクリューブレイカー 轟振どりるれろ sukuryūbureikā gōshin dorirurero?), released outside of Japan as Drill Dozer.
Satoshi Tajiri has allegedly been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome.[1][2] He has been described by Nintendo officials as exceedingly creative but "reclusive" and "eccentric,"[3] characteristics consistent with Asperger's.
