Watanabe: At that time, we were working with one of Bandai’s divisions, that is now called the Boy’s Toy Division, on developing the Tamagotchi. Because Tamagotchi gave off a strong impression that it was aimed at a female audience, we thought that we just had to make one that was aimed at boys, and thus began the planning. Since it was a Tamagotchi for boys, we had originally named it the Otokotchi₁; that name was changed to Capsule Zaurus₂ as we developed its contents further. However, the capsule idea would infringe on other companies’ products, so we ended up with the name Digital Monster, from the idea that they were ‘monsters that live through data’. When shortened, the name would become ‘Digimon’, and while we did discuss that that again almost infringes on the name of another company’s product, the trademark got accepted so I guess all’s well (laughs).



Since it was based off Tamagotchi, there were also a lot of cute designs among the monsters; we made monsters whose elemental affinities, such as fire, water, or electricity, were identifiable by their colors. However, that really was a bit too similar to that other company’s product, so I was asked to create brand new drawings for our product. Drawing inspiration from Spawn¹, an American comic, as well as artists such as Simon Bisley² and Mike Mignola³, I added some little touches I was fond of back then while trying to draw illustrations aimed towards children, and that marked the start of Digimon illustration.