Where Pokémon Came From

The highest-grossing media franchise on Earth started as a kid catching beetles in a Tokyo suburb and being annoyed that the fields kept turning into apartment blocks.

Dr. Bug

Satoshi Tajiri grew up in Machida in the 1970s, collecting insects obsessively enough that classmates called him Dr. Bug. He would put sticks in the ground overnight to trap beetles that hid under them, and trade specimens with other kids. Suburban development erased most of those ponds and woods within a decade. The game is, fairly explicitly, an attempt to hand that experience to children who no longer have the fields.

A magazine, then a studio

In 1983 Tajiri was writing and stapling together a fanzine about arcade games called Game Freak. A reader named Ken Sugimori wrote in to say the illustrations were bad and was promptly recruited to draw them. The magazine became a development studio, Sugimori became the artist who would design the original 151 creatures, and the name stuck.

The cable

The idea arrived with the Game Boy link cable. Everyone else saw a way to play competitively against a friend; Tajiri saw a tube with something crawling through it. The pitch, originally called Capsule Monsters, made trading mandatory — certain creatures only evolve when handed to another player, and each version deliberately withholds some so no single cartridge can be completed alone. Cooperation was designed into the scarcity.

Six years, nearly bankrupt

Development ran from roughly 1990 to 1996 and repeatedly nearly killed the company. Staff left, salaries went unpaid, and Tajiri reportedly funded stretches himself. Shigeru Miyamoto mentored the project and Nintendo kept backing it well past the point most publishers would have stopped. Red and Green finally shipped in February 1996, on a black-and-white handheld that was seven years old and widely considered finished.

Mew, and the slow burn

Sales started modest and climbed for months by word of mouth — the opposite of a normal release curve. The accelerant was Mew. Programmer Shigeki Morimoto slipped it into a few hundred spare bytes after debug code was stripped out, as an in-joke for the staff; it was never meant to be obtainable. Nintendo turned it into a mail-in distribution for twenty winners, the rumor mill did the rest, and the game became a phenomenon on the strength of a creature that was not supposed to exist.

Two small nods survive in the text: the player character is named Satoshi and the rival is named Shigeru — after Tajiri and Miyamoto, respectively. The whole franchise is a memoir with a battle system attached.