Satoshi Tajiri’s video-game fanzine was called Game Freak before Game Freak became a development company.
Tajiri wrote and edited the handmade magazine from 1981 to 1986. It focused on arcade games, including strategies, high scores, and hidden features. The publication was assembled as a fan-made zine rather than a conventional commercial magazine.
Artist Ken Sugimori encountered Game Freak at a dōjinshi shop and became its illustrator. Tajiri and Sugimori later transformed the publishing project into a video-game development company in 1989. That company eventually developed the original Pokémon games for Nintendo’s Game Boy.
The name therefore predates Pokémon and was not created specifically for the monster-collecting franchise. This history is also why “Game Freak” can refer both to Tajiri’s early magazine and to the studio behind the core Pokémon role-playing games. The fanzine’s arcade focus provided an early foundation for the creators’ later game-design careers.