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Game Freak
| Name: | Game Freak |
| Date(s): | 1989 |
| Profit/Nonprofit: | Profit |
| Country based in: | Japan |
| Focus: | Pokémon |
| External Links: | |
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Game Freak (株式会社ゲームフリーク, Kabushiki gaisha Gēmu Furīku) is a Japanese video game development studio, mostly known as the primary developer and co-owners of the Pokémon video game series.
Fandom origins
Game Freak was a self-published video game zine created by Tajiri Satoshi in the 1980s.
Tajiri published the first issue of his fanzine, Game Freak, in March 1983, three years after Space Invaders sieged his every waking hour. It was 14 pages long and sold for 200 yen. A portion of the debut issue is devoted to game bugs and how to trigger them. He titled it Game Freak after his own nom de high score. “It was handwritten,” Tajiri told TIME. “I stapled the pages together. It had techniques on how to win games, secret tips for games like Donkey Kong.” The issue was credited to “Taji Corp.,” a semi-fictional company, but one that would eventually become the studio Game Freak, the world-famous developer of Pokémon.[1]
Tajiri had no trouble connecting with readers; after all, they were as starved for information as he was. And as a fan-cum-creator, he was hardly alone. He had the tacit support of the doujinshi community, a loose network of amateur writers and artists who self-publish manga, novels, and art books inspired by (and sometimes wholly derivative of) commercial characters and proper-ties. In fact, Game Freak was sold in doujinshi shops, common in Japan. One of the readers who discovered Tajiri’s fanzine was none other than Ken Sugimori, the artist who designed most of the original 151 Pokémon. Sugimori was so impressed by Game Freak that he wrote to its creator, offering his services from the ninth issue onwards.[1]
Pokémon fandom
Notes
References
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