A Trainer's History of Pokémon

Every legend has a starting town. This one is Machida, on the edge of Tokyo, in the 1970s.

A quiet boy named Satoshi Tajiri spent every free hour in the ponds, rice paddies and forests around his home, hunting insects. He studied where beetles hid, invented tricks for finding them (they liked resting under stones — so he left stones out overnight), and collected so obsessively that the other kids gave him a nickname: Dr. Bug. His dream job? Entomologist — a bug scientist.

Then Tokyo grew. The ponds were drained. The fields were paved into apartment blocks and shopping centres. The bugs disappeared — and so did the game of finding them. Tajiri never forgot that feeling: that kids in the city would never get to hunt creatures the way he had.

Around the same time, arcades arrived in Japan. Tajiri fell for games like Space Invaders as hard as he'd fallen for beetles. Two obsessions, one brain. Hold that thought.

Game Freak wasn't founded as a company. It was founded as a homemade magazine.

In the early 1980s, teenage Tajiri started writing a video game fanzine — handwritten, stapled together, packed with arcade tips and secrets. He called it Game Freak. At its peak, single issues sold up to 10,000 copies.

One reader was an artist his age named Ken Sugimori. He found the zine in a shop, thought "the drawings could be better — mine are better," and joined as its illustrator. Remember that name: Sugimori went on to design or supervise the look of basically every Pokémon you know.

In 1989, Tajiri and Sugimori turned the magazine into a real game studio — Game Freak Inc., named after their own zine — and shipped their first game, Quinty. It did fine. But Tajiri was already sketching something much stranger.

In 1990, Tajiri saw two Game Boys connected by a Link Cable — and had the idea that would eat six years of his life.

Everyone else saw a cable for two-player Tetris. Tajiri imagined something weirder: living creatures crawling along the wire from one machine to the other. Bug collecting, but inside a Game Boy — and this time you could trade.

He pitched Nintendo a game called Capsule Monsters, inspired by capsule-toy vending machines. Nintendo's executives didn't really understand it — but they saw something in Tajiri, and the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto became his mentor. (When a trademark problem killed the name "Capsule Monsters," it eventually became Pocket Monsters. You know the short version.)

Then came the hard years. Development dragged on and on. Five employees quit. There was barely money for payroll, and Tajiri stopped paying himself entirely, living off his father's income. A company called Creatures Inc. finally invested to keep the lights on — in exchange for one-third of the franchise rights. Nobody at that table knew they were negotiating over what would become the most valuable media franchise in history.

One more Miyamoto masterstroke: Tajiri originally wanted thousands of slightly-different cartridges, so no two kids' games would match. Impractical. Miyamoto's fix — release just two visibly different versions, with different Pokémon in each, so kids would have to trade. That is why Red and Green exist. And Blue. And Scarlet and Violet. And every pair since.

What happened next has a name historians actually use: Pokémania.

April 1, 1997: the anime debuts in Japan with "Pokémon, I Choose You!" — and a mascot decision that changed everything. The early manga had starred Clefairy, and Clefairy was reportedly considered for the show too. The anime team chose Pikachu instead, betting it would appeal to everyone, everywhere. Reasonable bet.

Then Pokémon hit America like weather. Red and Blue on September 28, 1998. The trading card game in January 1999 — a 102-card Base Set that started playground economies overnight. The first movie topped the US box office in November 1999. That same month, Pokémon became the first video game franchise ever on the cover of TIME magazine. Four products, fourteen months, one slogan: Gotta Catch 'Em All.

And just as the wave crested, Japan got Gold and Silver (November 1999): 100 new Pokémon, a real day-and-night clock, breeding — and 1.4 million copies sold on day one.

July 6, 2016. A phone game launches, and for a few weeks, planet Earth plays it simultaneously.

Pokémon GO put Pokémon on real streets, and the world lost its mind. It became the fastest game in mobile history to earn $100 million — 20 days. A hundred million downloads in its first month. Five Guinness World Records by August. Parks filled with strangers sprinting, in groups, toward the same invisible Snorlax. The news that summer was full of players so glued to their screens they walked into fountains, poles and each other.

Here's the part people miss: it was Tajiri's original dream, completed. The boy who hunted bugs in fields that got paved over had, in the end, turned the paved world itself back into the field.

Ten years on, GO is still one of the biggest games on Earth — hundreds of millions of players later, it changed hands in 2025 for $3.5 billion, and its tenth-anniversary GO Fest in 2026 packed a record 100,000+ trainers into a single Chicago park.

Which brings us to now. Pokémon turned 30 on February 27, 2026, and celebrated by revealing Generation 10. TCG Pocket has 200+ million downloads. Champions launched this spring. The World Championships hit San Francisco two weeks from when this book was written. Thirty years in, the franchise isn't slowing down — it's accelerating.

Somewhere in Tokyo, a quiet man who used to be called Dr. Bug watches a billion people hunt creatures he dreamed up because his childhood fields got paved over. That's the whole story, really. The best revenge on a paved field is to make the entire world your field.