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.

In Japan, violence in games is pretty much self-regulated.There's more violence in games in the U.S., in things like Mortal Kombat, where they rip out hearts and cut off heads.

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.

Japanese people wouldn't come up with ideas of blood splattering all over. Japanese focus more on the intricacies of the actions, the motion.

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

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

When I was 18 I already had a business going.