Satoshi Tajiri (田尻智 Tajiri Satoshi?, born on August 28, 1965) is a Japanese video game designer and the creator of Pokémon.
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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 children would not be able to go bug-catching as he did.
Satoshi did not like school. His father wanted him to be an electrical utility repairman, but this is not what he wanted. His ideas for Pokémon grew, as he wanted to give modern children the chance to hunt for creatures as he did. Satoshi got into games when he was at technical school, spending all his time in arcades.
In 1982, Satoshi and his friends James Hanzatko and Yuusuke Santamaria formed a game magazine, called "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 game 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 his early magazine.
Tajiri went to work for Nintendo and spent the next six years working on Pokémon. He later 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 English games, and "Green" in the original Japanese version) is named Shigeru in the Japanese version of Pokémon.
Most recently, Tajiri (along with Nintendo 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’s syndrome.[1][2] He has been described by Nintendo officials as exceedingly creative but "reclusive" and "eccentric."[3]
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