Last week’s Autism Care UK profiled Japanese composer
Hikari Ōe. This week we take a look at another Japanese autism success story
and the brain behind one of the Land of the Rising Sun’s most popular exports,
Satoshi Tajiri.
Who is Satoshi Tajiri?
It’s
not very likely that you have heard Satoshi Tajiri, but it is very likely that
you have heard of his creation that started as a way to keep himself
entertained and grew into a $30 billion global franchise, incorporating video
games, lunch boxes, trading cards, films, television shows, clothing ranges and
even a theme park – Pokémon.
In the Spotlight.
Although not wide-known
outside of gaming circles, Tajiri is an innovator and one of the most important
computer game developers to date. Like his fellow Nintedo legend Shigeru
Miyamoto, Tajiri’s work was inspired by childhood hobbies. Whilst Miyamoto’s
creation Zelda was inspired by his boyhood adventures and explorations, Pokémon
is the product of Tajiri’s love of insects and his insect collections.
Tajiri career started at
the tender of 17 when he started writing and editing his own fanzine focused on
thr arcade game scene Game Freak, which
he ran for five years between 1981 and 1985. Despite the fact it was
handwritten and stapled together it proved a cult success and Ken Sugimori who
went on to illustrated the original 151 Pokémon saw the publication in a shop
wanted to get involved. More and more contributors followed and Game Freak grew. As more and more
contributors got involved in Tajiri realized that most games were lacking in
quality. Tajiri along with Sugimori decided that most games were actually
lacking quality and as such they decided to start making their own games. After Nintendo released the Family BASIC programming language, Tajiri studied
it to better grasp the designs of Nintendo Entertainment System games. He then
purchased the hardware to develop games. So
in 1989 Tajiri and Sugimori evolved the magazine into the video game
development company with the same name, Game Freak. The duo pitched their first game Quinty to large Japanese game developer Namco,
who bought the rights to the game and published it. As a teenager, he was a devoted player of Donkey
Kong and even published tips and shortcuts to the game. Later, he dropped
out of high school but went on to attend technical college.
He
also has also worked on spin-offs of the popular Mario Series Yoshi and Mario
& Wario, but undoubtedly his greatest work was the Pokémon series that he
devised in 1990. Tajiri
first conceived the idea of Pokémon in 1990. After
Tariri saw a Game Boy, the idea came together, and he
decided it made the most sense on the handheld console. Tajiri pioneered the
idea of connectivity between handheld
game consoles, by suggesting that Game Boys could use its link
cables in order to have friends do more than simply play against
each other.
Inspiration.
Tajiri grew up in rural Japan where he became
obsessed with bugs, so much that other children point that he was dubbed Dr.
Bug by other children, and this was the inspiration behind Pokémon. As the
rural areas of the country gave way to urban areas, Tajiri wanted to give children the chance
to replicate the joy he had in going out and looking for bugs, whilst combining
his other great passion in his life, computer games.
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