Zitate

When you're a kid and get your first bike, you want to go somewhere you've never been before. That's like Pokémon. Everybody shares the same experience, but everybody wants to take it someplace else. And you can do that.

As a child, I wanted to be an entomologist. Insects fascinated me.

Every time I found a new insect, it was mysterious to me. And the more I searched for insects, the more I found.

In Japan, violence in games is pretty much self-regulated. In the 1980s, there was a game called Bullfighter where the matador stabbed the bull and red blood squirted out. The day after it was released, they changed the blood to green. There's more violence in games in the U.S., in things like Mortal Kombat, where they rip out hearts and cut off heads. Japanese people wouldn't come up with ideas of blood splattering all over. Japanese focus more on the intricacies of the actions, the motion.

The more I learned about games, the more frustrated I became because the games weren't very good. I could tell a good game from a bad game. My conclusion was: let's make our own games.

If a horse runs over you and you die, then the horse is bad. But if you're riding the horse, the horse is your ally. So, if you have a monster in your collection, then it's considered good. But if not, it's still not considered bad, because it could be your friend one day.

[About his sleeping pattern]: It's the way I work. I sleep 12 hours and then work 24 hours. I've worked those irregular hours for the past three years. It's better to stay up day and night to come up with ideas. I usually get inspiration for game designing by working this schedule.

Places to catch insects are rare because of urbanizations. Kids play inside their homes now, and a lot had forgotten about catching insects. So had I. When I was making games, something clicked and I decided to make a game with that concept.

I saw Game Boy when it was first released. The idea for Pokémon clicked in my mind. The basic idea for Pokemon seemed a good fit for Game Boy.

I liked coming up with new ideas.

The communication aspect of Game Boy - it was a profound image to me. It has a communication cable. In Tetris, its first game, the cable transmitted information about moving blocks. That cable really got me interested. I thought of actual living organisms moving back and forth across the cable.

I'm part of the first generation who grew up with manga [comics] and anime [animation], you know, after 'Godzilla.' I was absorbed with Ultraman on TV and in manga.

When I finished Pokemon, I thought Nintendo would reject it. I was like a baseball player sliding into second base knowing he's going to be out. But somehow, I was safe.

Everything I did as a kid is kind of rolled into one - that's what Pokemon is.

I was really careful in making monsters faint rather than die. I think that young people playing games have an abnormal concept about dying. They start to lose and say, 'I'm dying.' It's not right for kids to think about a concept of death that way. They need to treat death with more respect.