When you're a kid and get your first bike, you want to go somewhere you've never been before. That's like Pokémon. Everybody shares the same experience, but everybody wants to take it someplace else. And you can do that.
As a child, I wanted to be an entomologist. Insects fascinated me.
I’m part of the first generation who grew up with manga [comics] and anime [animation], you know, after ‘Godzilla.’ I was absorbed with Ultraman on TV and in manga.
I saw Game Boy when it was first released. The idea for Pokémon clicked in my mind. The basic idea for Pokemon seemed a good fit for Game Boy.
The communication aspect of Game Boy - it was a profound image to me. It has a communication cable. In Tetris, its first game, the cable transmitted information about moving blocks. That cable really got me interested. I thought of actual living organisms moving back and forth across the cable.
The place where I grew up was still rural back then. There were rice paddies, rivers, forests. It was full of nature. I was really interested in collecting insects.
Development started taking place, and as it grew, all the insects would decrease. The change was so dramatic. A fishing pond would become an arcade centre.
It was as sinful as shoplifting. My parents cried that I had become a delinquent.
I was really into Space Invaders in about 1978. It got me more and more interested in video games. There wasn’t any media to get information about games, so I came up with Game Freak magazine.
It was handwritten. I stapled the pages together. It had techniques on how to win games, secret tips for games like Donkey Kong.
The biggest sales were for a special issue on the Zabius game. We sold 10,000 copies. It cost 300 yen each. So when I was 18, I already had a business going.
Places to catch insects are rare because of urbanizations. Kids play inside their homes now, and a lot had forgotten about catching insects. So had I. When I was making games, something clicked and I decided to make a game with that concept.
Everything I did as a kid is kind of rolled into one – that’s what Pokemon is.
Basically, he’s me when I was a kid.
It’s the way I work. I sleep 12 hours and then work 24 hours. I've worked those irregular hours for the past three years. It's better to stay up day and night to come up with ideas. I usually get inspiration for game designing by working this schedule.
I liked competition too. But I wanted to design a game that involved interactive communication. Remember, there was no Internet then. The concept of the communication cable is really Japanese: one-on-one. It's like karate - two players compete, they bow to each other. It's the Japanese concept of respect.
If a horse runs over you and you die, then the horse is bad. But if you're riding the horse, the horse is your ally. So, if you have a monster in your collection, then it's considered good. But if not, it's still not considered bad, because it could be your friend one day.
The more I learned about games, the more frustrated I became because the games weren't very good. I could tell a good game from a bad game. My conclusion was: let's make our own games.
Every time I found a new insect, it was mysterious to me. And the more I searched for insects, the more I found.
If I put my hand in the river, I would get a crayfish. If there was a stick over a hole, it would create an air bubble and I’d find insects there. As I gathered more and more, I’d learn more about them, like how some would feed on one another.
I liked coming up with new ideas.
So in the morning I’d go pick up the stone and find them. Tiny discoveries like that made me excited.
When I finished Pokemon, I thought Nintendo would reject it. I was like a baseball player sliding into second base knowing he’s going to be out. But somehow, I was safe.
At first, I was a little concerned. It depends on how people are introduced to Pokemon. If they start with the TV show, or with the cards, or the video game, they approach it differently each time.
I was really careful in making monsters faint rather than die. I think that young people playing games have an abnormal concept about dying. They start to lose and say, ‘I’m dying.’ It’s not right for kids to think about a concept of death that way. They need to treat death with more respect.
In Japan, violence in games is pretty much self-regulated. In the 1980s, there was a game called Bullfighter where the matador stabbed the bull and red blood squirted out. The day after it was released, they changed the blood to green. There's more violence in games in the U.S., in things like Mortal Kombat, where they rip out hearts and cut off heads. Japanese people wouldn't come up with ideas of blood splattering all over. Japanese focus more on the intricacies of the actions, the motion.
It created a myth about the game, that there was an invisible character out there. Someone gives me Mew, then I give Mew to you, then you pass it on. Introducing a new character like that created a lot of rumors and myths about the game. It kept the interest alive.
Yeah, everyone was using it to compete. The idea I had was for information to go back and forth. It wasn't about competition.
Every new insect was a wonderful mystery. And as I searched for more, I would find more.
I’m very careful about violence in games. I’m not interested in creating violent effects.
Nobody else thought to do that.
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