This is an encore presentation of my episode about Satoshi Tajiri and Pokemon is one of the biggest games in modern history. For over 25 years, hundreds of millions of people around the world have enjoyed videogames, card games, cartoons, and movies. But how did it all get started? For that we need to go back a little further than the 25 years of Pokemon, back to the 1960s and 70s in Machida Tokyo Japan, and a little boy named Satoshi Tajiri. Even though Tokyo is obviously a big city, the area where Satoshi grew up was still kind of rural. He loved exploring nature and in particular, he liked catching bugs. The other kids took notice of his love of entomology and called him Dr. Bug. The thing is, Machida didn’t stay rural. Satoshi saw Tokyo’s urban sprawl pave over the space where he grew up and he felt a sense of loss.

As an adult in the 1980s, he started a gaming magazine, then decided that making his own games would be more satisfying than writing about other people’s games. He and his friends started the video game company Game Freak with some modest success early on. In the early 1990s, Satoshi came up with an idea for a game inspired by his childhood. He thought about all the kids growing up in cities who wouldn’t get the chance to enjoy exploring nature and collecting bugs as he had. He thought it would be great to build a game around this idea with a kid collecting fantasy creatures he called pocket monsters.

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Caleb Smith

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