Predating the video game company,
Game Freak was a self-published
video game magazine created by
Satoshi Tajiri in 1983.
Ken Sugimori joined the magazine at a later date as an illustrator after finding the magazine in a shop and liking it. Tajiri also used "Game Freak" as his pen name when he wrote as a freelance writer to publications such as
Family Computer Magazine and
Famicom Tsūshin. On April 26, 1989, Tajiri and Sugimori started a video game development company with the same name. One of Game Freak's first games was the
Nintendo Entertainment System action and puzzle game
Quinty, which was released in North America as
Mendel Palace. Its most popular series,
Pokémon—the
romanized portmanteau of the Japanese brand —is published and distributed respectively by
the Pokémon Company and
Nintendo worldwide. In October 2015, Game Freak acquired Koa Games, a mobile development company. The company was subsequently merged into Game Freak on December 1, 2015. In May 2019, Game Freak director Masayuki Onoue revealed that Game Freak is increasingly prioritizing original game creation, in order to grow the experience of its staff. The company's Gear Project initiative, which encourages creators to pitch original game ideas during quiet periods, has so far resulted in original games
HarmoKnight,
Pocket Card Jockey,
Tembo the Badass Elephant and
Giga Wrecker. In February 2020, Game Freak relocated its headquarters from
Carrot Tower in
Sangen-jaya to Kanda Square, an office building in
Nishikichō shared with a number of Nintendo's Tokyo-based subsidiaries. In October 2024, nearly a terabyte of data from Game Freak's
servers was stolen. Development
builds,
source code, and test
sprites either planned or released for past
Pokémon games were found, as well as
code names for upcoming
Pokémon games, and prototypes of unreleased remakes of
Quinty and
Yoshi. Shortly afterwards, Game Freak addressed the incident, stating that the leak was due to "unauthorized access to our servers by a third party", which had taken place in August 2024. == Games ==