2026-10-28
Satoshi Tajiri: Putting a Childhood Forest Inside a Link Cable — How a Bug-Obsessed Outsider Built the Highest-Grossing IP in Human History
Ranked #42 on the 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World: Satoshi Tajiri, OVR 88.25 (Insight 92, Taste 90, Originality 90, Scale 88, Vision 87, Business 83). Watching bulldozers pave over the ponds and oak groves of suburban Tokyo where he caught beetles as a boy, Tajiri looked at Gunpei Yokoi's ignored Game Boy Link Cable and saw insects crawling between screens. After six brutal years of near-bankruptcy, his twin-version collect-and-trade loop turned Pokémon into a $150B+ cultural juggernaut.
