If you’re familiar with Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri, there’s likely two things about him you’ve heard countless times over the years. First up, it’s well known that Tajiri’s love of bug collecting inspired him to create Pokémon. Second, there’s literally decades worth of chatter claiming Satoshi Tajiri is autistic. While the former is 100% true, the latter appears to be false.

Kyle Tarpley from Did You Know Gaming was nice enough to reach out with a brand-new feature his team put together, and it focuses on Satoshi Tajiri. In particular, the team tried to find out just where the claims of Satoshi Tajiri being autistic came from. It’s a long and winding road that ends at a rather dubious source; a MySpace page.

Believe it or not, a 2009 biography about Satoshi Tajiri used a MySpace page as proof that Tajiri had autism. The page included references to the autistic community, but it was never confirmed the page belonged to Tajiri. Making matters even worse, any mention of autism was removed from the MySpace page years later. In other words, this decades-long “truth” stems from an extremely unreliable, never confirmed source.

The entire feature from Did You Know Gaming is well worth a watch, as it dives much deeper into the topic. Carve out some free time in your schedule and check it out.

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Comments (3)

donutmuffin

2y ago

Ah, the days when you can just make up anything you want and people on the internet will believe it. Good thing society has gotten smarter and that doesn't happen anymore.


socar

2y ago

Seriously man, who cares if Satoshi Tajiri is autistic or not? He created Pokemon and its been loved by many. Does it even matter at this point?


elfteiroh

2y ago

@socar

For some autistic people, it might have been a very inspiring thing. But at the same time, claiming that someone that is not autistic, is… is not good. So yeah. :/