Who directed the original Pokémon Red and Green games?

Satoshi Tajiri directed the original Pokémon Red and Green games.

Tajiri founded Game Freak, which began as a video game magazine and later became a development studio. His interest in collecting insects inspired the central idea behind Pokémon: players could find, capture, train, trade, and battle creatures. The Game Boy Link Cable particularly influenced the concept, because Tajiri imagined creatures moving between connected systems.

For the first games, Tajiri was credited as director, while Nintendo producer Shigeru Miyamoto served as a major adviser and producer. Ken Sugimori created the character and creature artwork, and Junichi Masuda worked as a programmer and composer. These roles are sometimes confused because all three became highly recognizable figures in Pokémon history.

The original games took several years to develop and faced technical and financial difficulties before their 1996 launch. Tajiri's design goal was not simply to create a combat game, but to encourage interaction between players. Trading version-exclusive Pokémon became one of the series' defining features and helped turn the Game Boy pair into a long-running global franchise.