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Pokemon was the brainchild of a Japanese man named Satoshi Tajiri, born August 28th, 1965. As a child, Tajiri was fascinated with insects, and loved to hunt and collect different species of them, as well as devise new methods to attract them.

Eventually, whilst Tajiri was in his early teens, most of the areas where Tajiri liked to hunt for bugs were replaced with modern establishments or demolished. No longer having the opportunity to collect insects, Tajiri created a fantasy in his mind about his adventures, his thoughts eventually evolving into a complicated idea. During the same time, Satoshi gained an interest in video games.

In 1982, Tajiri formed a magazine with a few of his friends dedicated to video games. The name of this magazine was Game Freak. Over the years, Game Freak\'s focas changed from covering gaming news into creating games - they officially announced themselves as a video game developer in 1989, and released their first game, Mario & Yoshi, in 1991, for both the Game Boy and the NES.

They subsequantly released several other games, but in 1996 they struck gold - they, along with the help of Creatures and Nintendo, released Pocket Monsters Akai and Pocket Monsters Midori in Japan. The games were both a hit, with Akai doing best, and Nintendo decided to translate the games to English and release them in North America and Europe. Before this, they remade the games with the improved Pocket Monsters Blue, and thus incorporated the improvements into the two games to be released in North America. Since Pocket Monsters was already trademarked by another company in the United States, they needed to change the name - so, they just combined the words to form Pokemon. Since Midori did not sell well, they decided to change some aspects of it for the American release - including changing the name from the translated Green to Blue (although a "Blue" version was also released in Japan earlier, which improved on the original games). Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue were both very successful in North America, and a series was born.

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