Enter Satoshi Tajiri

Born 28th August, 1965, Tajiri lived in Machida, a city located within the larger metropolis of Tokyo itself. He grew up with a love of collecting insects from the ponds, fields and forests near his home and his passion even earned him the title of "Doctor Bug" among his friends. As he grew up though, his old stomping grounds were eventually paved over and replaced with apartments and parking lots, leaving Tajiri feeling that new generations of children were going to miss out on the experiences he loved so much as a child. Even now, in the 70s, the seeds of what would eventually become Pokémon were being sown in Tajiri's mind.

As you can expect, while at technical school, Tajiri found a new love in the arcades and, never one to take his hobbies mildly, he spent so much time in his local arcade that the owner even gave him a Space Machines cabinet to take home with him. But just playing games wasn't enough for Tajiri. At 16, he submitted a game design concept to a contest run by Sega and won. A year later, he founded Game Freak - in the form of a games magazine (in 1982, a year before even the NES launched) - along with friend and later main Pokémon artist, Ken Sugimori. Game Freak enjoyed modest sales and became quite popular amongst Japan's gaming youth before finally moving into developing games themselves in the 90s - debuting with NES game Quinty/Mendel Palace.

Until Pulseman for Sega's Mega Drive/Genesis came around in 1994, Game Freak's major claim to fame was a run of Mario spin-off titles - the very franchise Game Freak would later compete against with Pokémon for the title of best selling franchise ever - including Mario & Wario and the Yoshi & Mario puzzle games.

Throughout this time, however, Tajiri had been fascinated with the Game Boy and its revolutionary - but as yet largely underused - link cable. Watching two children playing a game connected by the link cable, Tajiri said he imagined "insects crawling along the cable between the two systems", and in that instant his childhood love for bug catching combined with his new passion for video games and Pokémon's concept was born. To fund, what would end up being, six years of development, Tajiri's other development company, Creatures Inc, was drafted into the development process as well.

Nintendo, who initially did not understand the project at all, assigned Shigeru Miyamoto - one of the greatest and most acclaimed game developers of all time, and the man behind Mario, Zelda, Pikmin and Donkey Kong - to help in the development of Pocket Monsters Red and Green. Unsurprisingly, Tajiri came to admire Miyamoto as a mentor, and this close admiration led to Pokémon's main character - Satoshi (after Tajiri himself) - having a rival in his own Shigeru.

A legend is born

In 1996, on the 27th February - after over half a decade of development and over 20 years after Tajiri's own childhood experiences of hunting and catching his own creatures - Pocket Monsters Red and Green Versions finally launched for Nintendo's Gameboy. The mere fact that the games were sold as two separate games, despite the fact the games were almost identical in every respect other than the Pokémon available within them, was a massively new and intriguing concept, and has since been copied again and again by other companies looking to emulate Pokémon's success. This concept, suggested by Miyamoto, was to promote the trading of Pokémon between the games, as without trading, it was impossible to 'catch 'em all' and complete your Pokédex.

The games were so hugely popular - far surpassing what Nintendo or even, Tajiri himself, expected - that just a few months later, on 16th October, a third - Blue - version was released as a mail-order-exclusive special version.

However, spending 6 years in development - especially for a system that, by today's standards, was rather primitive in its language assembly - left the games' code in a hugely fragile state. Although game breaking glitches were pretty rare, the games were certainly not without their issues. But it was only when the games moved to North America for an English localisation that the scale of the games' coding issues became truely apparent. The normal localisation process to alter the Japanese text to English became impossible without breaking the games completely, and the only option left was an entire reprogramming from scratch.

During this extended localisation, Nintendo of America was as wary of the concept as Nintendo of Japan once was - but for different reasons. Localizers warned that American children would not accept the "cute monsters" and reccommended that they be redesigned and "beefed-up". Normally such a massive style change to the games wouldn't have even been possible during localisation - but with the games spending the best part of two years in localisation due to the reprogramming, the Pokémon we know today could very easily have been an entirely different - and possibly less successful - series.

Then Nintendo President, Hiroshi Yamauchi, however, refused to accept the localizers' reccommendations and viewed the possible reception in America as a challenge to overcome. His decision meant that, when Pokémon Red and Blue launched in America on 30th September 1998, the games featured the same 150(+1) Pokémon as they did in Japan and that challenge of the U.S. audience was easily overcome. The games went on to become record breakers, clinching the titles of "Best-selling RPG of all time" and "Best-selling RPG on the Gameboy" - with 8.6 million sales in the U.S. alone.

Finally, then, a year later, on the 10th May 1999, Red and Blue hit Europe and the games were finally out onto an international market - almost ten years after the games began development back in Japan.

Beating all the expectations of Nintendo on both sides of the Pacific, Tajiri himself and hitting the market as a unique concept; Pokémon caught the gaming public's imagination and became a massive success. Not only for Game Freak, but for Nintendo as Game Boy sales rocketed and came with the opportunity for them to take the series even farther with merchandising - the impact of which would only really be felt as Red and Blue hit the states; and with them came the series' expansion onto dominating other media...