The Art of Autism – Empowering through the Arts

Calling Pokemon a world-wide phenomenon would be a gross understatement. The franchise has redefined a generation through its hordes of games, TV seasons, manga adaptations, toys, cards, and so much more.

But as Pokemon fans prepare for the release of Pokemon Sun/Moon or despair over Ash losing yet another Pokemon League tournament, it’s easy to forget how it all got started. Before Pokemon Go, the Johto region, Master Balls, and even Pikachu, there was a man named Satoshi Tajiri.  In honor of Pokemon’s 20th Anniversary, I think it’s only right to look at the man who started it all.

Born in Tokyo in 1965, the young Satoshi had various obsessions — collecting bugs as a kid and arcade games as a teenager.

The latter captured so much of his time and attention that he actually cut classes and wound up flunking high school. His parents were concerned; they actually didn’t understand his obsession with games and thought he was a delinquent throwing his life away.

He eventually took make-up classes and got his high school diploma, but he only did a two year stint at the Tokyo National College of Technology studying computer science and electronics.

If you think that he put a cork in his video game obsession during his studies, think again. When he was seventeen, he started writing and editing a fan magazine that focused on the arcade game scene called Game Freak. 

Sound familiar to any fans? That’s because Game Freak is one of the companies that makes the Pokemon games, their logo and name appearing every time you start the game up. How did it jump from fan magazine to game juggernaut?

Enter Ken Sugimori, the man who would later to go illustrate the original 151 Pokemon (for the uninitiated, the franchise began with 151 unique monsters players would try to catch; there are currently 721 with more to come).

He came across the magazine in a shop, liked it, and joined the team as the illustrator.  After Game Freak grew and got several more contributors, Ken and Satoshi decided that they were disappointed with the current batch of video games and decided to make their own. Thus, after studying the coding language they would need to go forward, Game Freak went from magazine to game company in 1989.

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