Who Created Pokémon?

Satoshi Tajiri is the Japanese game designer who created Pokémon. He was born in 1965 near Tokyo, and as a child he loved collecting insects, an interest that later inspired the idea of catching creatures in the games.

As a young man he started a self-published gaming magazine called Game Freak with the artist Ken Sugimori, and the two turned it into a game development studio of the same name. Tajiri pitched the idea of using the Game Boy's link cable to trade creatures between players, which became the heart of the first games.

The original Pokémon designs were led by Ken Sugimori, the artist who co-founded Game Freak with Tajiri. A small team drew the first 151 creatures for the original games.

As the franchise grew, the design work spread across a much larger art team, but Sugimori stayed closely involved with the overall look of the series for many years and drew much of its official artwork.

Pokémon is managed by The Pokémon Company, founded in 1998. The franchise is not owned by any single company: The Pokémon Company is a joint venture between three owners, Nintendo, Game Freak, and Creatures.

This is a detail many people get wrong. Nintendo is one of the three owners and publishes the games, but it does not own Pokémon by itself. The Pokémon Company was set up specifically to manage the franchise across games, cards, the anime, and merchandise.

Game Freak, the studio Satoshi Tajiri founded, still develops the main-series Pokémon games. Nintendo publishes them, and The Pokémon Company oversees the franchise overall.

A number of spin-off games, from mobile titles to console side stories, are made by other studios. To see how the games and generations line up over time, read the Pokémon history and timeline.