On what date was Game Freak Co., Ltd. officially incorporated?

Game Freak Co., Ltd. was officially incorporated on April 26, 1989.

The company grew from Game Freak, a video-game fanzine created by Satoshi Tajiri. Tajiri and illustrator Ken Sugimori developed the publication into a game-development team, and the company later became the studio behind Pokémon's core role-playing games.

Game Freak's incorporation predates Pokémon by several years. Tajiri conceived Pokémon around 1990, and the original Red and Green games were not released until February 1996. This timeline matters because Pokémon was not the company's first project; Game Freak first developed other games, including the arcade-style puzzle title Quinty.

The name Game Freak is therefore both a historical company name and a key part of Pokémon's origin story. Nintendo published the Pokémon games, but Game Freak's development role traces back to this earlier independent studio founded by Tajiri and Sugimori.