Game Freak was founded as a video game company in 1989.
Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori originally collaborated on a video game fanzine called Game Freak. The publication began in 1981 and focused on arcade games, strategies, and discoveries. In 1989, they transformed the name into a development company.
Game Freak’s first published game was Quinty, released by Namco in 1989. The company later created games for Nintendo and other publishers before beginning work on Pokémon. Its knowledge of game design and Tajiri’s ideas about collecting creatures eventually led to the Pokémon project.
The dates are easy to mix up. 1981 refers to the fanzine’s beginning, while 1990 is the year commonly associated with Tajiri’s initial Pokémon concept. Pokémon Red and Green finally launched in 1996, seven years after Game Freak became a development company.