🧠 Pokémon's New 1,025-Creature Pokédex Began as One Boy's Lost Bug Field — Woody Magazine, May 15, 2026
Pokémon Just Unveiled a 1,025-Creature, 30-Year Pokédex.
It Began as One Boy's Lost Bug Field.
On Friday morning, the Japanese publisher Overlap put out a quiet notice. On August 7, it will release the Pokémon Official National Pokédex 1996–2026 — a single volume containing all 1,025 Pokémon, from the first-generation Pikachu through the latest ninth-generation entries. The price: 2,500 yen. Within hours, social feeds filled with variations of the same line: "My entire childhood now fits inside one book." Marketing observers noted, fairly enough, that the round number — thirty years — was aimed squarely at people in their thirties and forties.
But the figure 1,025 carries a heavier story than the marketing. The man who built Pokémon, Satoshi Tajiri, set out three decades ago not to celebrate the joy of collecting, but to keep a record of something that was disappearing.
A significant share are modeled on real insects, amphibians, and freshwater creatures.
The landscape Tajiri wanted to record was the one he himself grew up in. Machida (町田), then a semi-rural suburb on the western edge of Tokyo. In the early 1970s, Machida still held rice paddies, small streams, and stretches of woodland — and the young Tajiri patrolled them as if they were hunting grounds. His classmates nicknamed him "Dr. Bug." He'd bring dragonflies, crayfish, and beetles home and sort them by species into empty jam jars. He didn't dream of being a game designer. He wanted to be an entomologist.
Of all those mysteries, the one Tajiri pursued longest was the saw-tooth stag beetle. It was nocturnal, hard to find by daylight. Other kids smeared honey on tree bark to draw insects in. Tajiri chose a different route. Each evening he would place a stone beside a tree trunk, then return at dawn to lift it and find a beetle asleep beneath. Once, after reading that the species was plentiful near a local graveyard, he slipped out of the house at four in the morning. The place was too unsettling to linger in, he later admitted, and he came home empty-handed.
Those dawns were possible only because Machida still held wilderness. That changed when Tajiri reached his late teens, as concrete began advancing through the suburb. Within a single generation, the habitats he had cataloged in his notebooks were gone. Tajiri's own phrasing remains the most exact: "A fish pond would become an arcade center." The adults around him called it Tokyo expanding. To him, it meant there were fewer insects left to catch. Eventually he set his net down and walked into one of those new arcades. The year was 1978. The game was Space Invaders.
The bug fields were gone, but the memory of them was not. Twelve years later, in 1990, Tajiri encountered a Nintendo Game Boy with a link cable connecting two consoles. Most people who saw that cable thought of competitive multiplayer. Tajiri saw something else: tiny creatures crawling along the wire, crossing from one console to a friend's. The childhood transaction — showing your jar of beetles to another kid in a field, swapping one for two — was now playing out along a thin gray cord. The seed of "Pocket Monsters" took root in that single image.
Having the idea was one thing. Turning it into a working game took six years. Game Freak — the studio Tajiri had co-founded — nearly went bankrupt during development. Tajiri himself drew no salary, borrowed money from his father, and slept at the office. Without Shigeru Miyamoto — the creator of Mario, whom Nintendo had assigned as his mentor — pushing the project through, the February 27, 1996 release would never have happened. When the game was finally finished, Tajiri made his own first name, "Satoshi," one of the default options for the player character, and "Shigeru," after Miyamoto, the default for the rival. (Anglophone audiences know the same pair as Ash and Gary, from the animated series that followed.) Three decades on, anyone starting Pokémon Red or Green still finds those two names waiting on the title screen — the quietest possible evidence that the franchise began as one person's private memory.
And the traces are not only in the names. The spiral on the belly of Poliwhirl — No. 61 in the original Pokédex — was drawn from Tajiri's memory of the coiled intestines visible through the translucent skin of a tadpole. A single tadpole he once scooped from a Machida pond and floated in a jar is, in effect, still swimming — in the same shape, on millions of screens, three decades later.
Look at the 1,025 again with that in mind. It is, very plausibly, a larger number than the species count of any bug field Tajiri could ever have personally cataloged. The collecting ground he lost did not come back in the physical world. But inside the game he built, the species kept multiplying for thirty years — and today that accumulation has been bound, at last, into a single paper volume.
If, another thirty years from now, someone leafs through the 1,025 entries and asks, "Are these all just bugs?" (they aren't, strictly), that question itself may be precisely the ending the boy who once slipped out toward a graveyard at 4 a.m. had been hoping to hear.
- Inven (Korean gaming press), "Pokémon Marks 30 Years With Complete 1,025-Creature Pokédex" (May 15, 2026) 「source ↗」
- TIME, "The Surprising History Behind the Word Pokémon" — citing 1999 Tajiri interview and Poliwhirl design origin 「source ↗」
- GameCrash, "The Beginning Part One: Satoshi Tajiri and GameFreak" — saw-tooth stag beetle and 4 a.m. graveyard anecdote 「source ↗」
- Wikipedia (English), "Satoshi Tajiri" — six-year development timeline; Game Boy link cable as conceptual origin; February 27, 1996 release date 「source ↗」
- Kotaku, "The Origins of Pokémon" — Machida's urbanization in the 1970s and the "Mr. Bug" nickname 「source ↗」
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