[3] Tajiri grew up in Machida, Tokyo, which at the time still maintained a rural atmosphere[4] and was rapidly growing.
[5] As a child, Tajiri enjoyed insect collecting as a hobby, which would be an inspiration for his later video game work.
[3] As urban areas of Japan spread and more land was paved over, habitats for hunting bugs were lost.
Satoshi created the Game Freak fanzine to help gamers with winning strategies and lists of easter eggs.
[17] When he first pitched the idea of Pokémon to Nintendo staff, they could not quite grasp the concept, but were impressed enough with Tajiri's game design reputation that they decided to explore it.
[3] Pokémon Red and Green took six years to produce, and nearly bankrupted Game Freak in the process; often, there was barely enough money to pay the employees.
[3] The Pokémon games were not expected to do well, but sales steadily increased until the series found itself among Nintendo's top franchises.
[6] Rumors of a hidden Pokémon creature named Mew, which could only be obtained by exploiting programming errors, increased interest in the game.
[3] Tajiri had included Mew in the game in order to promote trading and interaction between players, but Nintendo was not aware of the creature upon release.
In this vein, he designed Pokémon creatures to faint rather than die upon their defeat, as he believed it was unhealthy for children to equate the concept of death with losing a game.
[4] After the completion and release of Red and Green in Japan, Tajiri later worked on 1997's Bushi Seiryūden: Futari no Yūsha.
[4] IGN named Tajiri one of the top 100 game creators of all time, mainly for his ability to have built Pokémon into a "worldwide phenomenon".
[26] Tajiri, alongside Tsunekazu Ishihara, received the Special Award from the Computer Entertainment Developers Conference in 2011.