Who created the Pokémon franchise and conceived its original video games?

Satoshi Tajiri created the Pokémon franchise and conceived its original video games.

Tajiri grew up collecting insects, an interest that helped inspire Pokémon’s central idea of finding, collecting, and studying creatures. He founded the video-game magazine Game Freak, which later became the development company responsible for the first Pokémon games.

Tajiri directed the original Pokémon titles while Ken Sugimori created much of the visual artwork and Nintendo published the games. Shigeru Miyamoto also played an important production role, but he was not the franchise’s creator.

The first games took years to develop and used the Game Boy Link Cable to make trading possible. That feature transformed a single-player adventure into a social collecting game and became one of Pokémon’s defining ideas. Tajiri continued to receive creator credit as the series expanded into animation, cards, merchandise, and films.