The most profitable entertainment franchise in history did not start in a boardroom. It started with a boy in Machida watching construction crews pour concrete over his favorite bug-catching pond. This look at Satoshi Tajiri follows the Dr. Bug nickname, the arcade that opened in his neighborhood during the Space Invaders boom, and the 1983 fanzine he named Game Freak after a 1932 film, at a time when video game magazines did not yet exist in Japan.

We dig into how a crew of teenage critics reverse-engineered Famicom hardware and recruited Junichi Masuda for sound to ship the puzzle game Quinty in 1989, the Dragon Quest II session where Ken Sugimori found two rare hats and Tajiri found none, and the synthesis of link cable, bug collecting, and gashapon capsule toys into a game about a boy’s summer day. Then the brutal six-year development on aging Game Boy hardware, Shigeru Miyamoto’s suggestion to split the game into two versions, the 300 bytes where programmer Shigeki Morimoto hid Mew, the CoroCoro magazine lottery that sparked playground mania, and Tajiri’s refusal to let Game Freak be absorbed into a larger company.

• Why a random item drop in Dragon Quest II convinced Tajiri the link cable should trade items rather than fuel competition
• How gashapon vending machines shaped the psychology of finding and collecting creatures
• Why two versions of the game turned cartridges into social currency and made completion impossible alone
• How removing debug tools before manufacturing freed exactly enough memory for a secret 151st creature
• Whether a digital replacement for a lost pond kept kids indoors or taught an urbanized generation to explore