I was really into Space Invaders in about 1978. It got me more and more interested in video games. There wasn't any media to get information about games, so I came up with Game Freak magazine.

I'm very careful about violence in games. I'm not interested in creating violent effects.

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.

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.

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.

I was really interested in collecting insects.

I had a cat, though. I wanted to name the frogs, because I watched them grow, but there were too many.