Tajiri signed a contract with Nintendo, which was impressed enough by his previous attempts at game programming to want to develop his latest idea. But he couldn’t quite explain the concept to Nintendo, and the company couldn’t understand it fully. “At first Pokemon was just an idea, and nothing happened,” says Shigeru Miyamoto, the genius behind Nintendo’s previous best seller, Super Mario Brothers. Miyamoto became Tajiri’s mentor and counseled the younger man as he toiled on what would eventually be Pokemon. (Tajiri would pay ambivalent tribute to Miyamoto, giving the name Shigeru–Gary in the U.S.–to the snotty chief rival of Satoshi/Ash.)