Gunpei Yokoi

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Template:Nihongo, sometimes transliterated as Gumpei Yokoi, was a Japanese toy maker and video game designer. As a long-time Nintendo employee, he was best known as creator of the Game & Watch handheld system, the original designer of the Game Boy, and producer of a few long-running and critically acclaimed video game franchises such as Metroid and Kid Icarus. The Nintendo philosophy of focusing on interactive gameplay over cutting edge technology was espoused by Yokoi.

Career

Yokoi graduated from Doshisha University with a degree in electronics. He was first hired by Nintendo in 1965 to maintain the assembly-line machines used to manufacture its hanafuda cards.<ref name=gi116>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

In 1966, Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo, came to a hanafuda factory where Yokoi was working and took notice of a toy, an extending arm that Yokoi made for his own amusement during spare time while doing maintenance. Yamauchi ordered Yokoi to develop it as a proper product for the Christmas rush. The Ultra Hand was a huge success, and Yokoi was asked to work on other Nintendo toys, including the Ten Billion Barrel puzzle, a miniature remote-controlled vacuum cleaner called the Chiritory, a baseball-throwing machine called the Ultra Machine, and a "Love Tester". He worked on toys until the company decided to make video games in 1974,<ref name="powerplay">Template:Cite book</ref> when he became one of its first game designers, only preceded by Genyo Takeda.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> While traveling on the Shinkansen, Yokoi supposedly saw a bored businessman playing with an LCD calculator by pressing the buttons. Yokoi then got the idea for a watch that doubled as a miniature video gaming pastime.<ref name="escapist">Template:Cite web</ref>

In 1981, Yamauchi appointed Yokoi to supervise Donkey Kong, an arcade game created by Shigeru Miyamoto.<ref name="Kent">Kent 158.</ref> Yokoi explained many of the intricacies of game design to Miyamoto at the beginning of his career, and the project only came to be approved after Yokoi brought Miyamoto's game ideas to the president's attention.<ref name="Iwata Asks NSMBW">Template:Cite web</ref>

After the worldwide success of Donkey Kong, Yokoi continued to work with Miyamoto on the next Mario game, Mario Bros.<ref name="Iwata Asks NSMBW"/> He proposed the multiplayer concept and convinced his co-worker to give Mario some superhuman abilities, such as the ability to jump unharmed from great heights.<ref name="Iwata Asks NSMBW"/>

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Yokoi is best known for his contribution in the creation of the Game Boy.
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Yokoi's Virtual Boy (1995)

After Mario Bros., Yokoi produced several R&D1 games, such as Kid Icarus and Metroid.<ref name=EGM102>Template:Cite magazine</ref> He designed R.O.B.<ref name="R.O.B. patent">Template:Cite patent</ref> and the Game Boy, the latter of which became a worldwide success.<ref name=EGM102/> Another of his creations, the Virtual Boy, was a commercial failure. Nintendo has denied that the Virtual Boy's poor performance in the market was the reason for Yokoi's subsequent departure from the company,<ref name="Profile: Gunpei Yokoi">Template:Cite web</ref> holding that his retirement was "absolutely coincidental" to the market performance of any Nintendo hardware.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> According to his Nintendo and Koto colleague Yoshihiro Taki, Yokoi had originally decided to retire at age 50 to do as he pleased but had simply delayed it.<ref name="Nintendo Magic">Template:Cite book</ref> According to David Sheff's book Game Over, Yokoi never actually intended for the console to be released in its present form. However, Nintendo pushed the Virtual Boy to market so that it could focus development resources on the Nintendo 64.<ref name="Game Over by David Sheff">Template:Cite book</ref>

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WonderSwan

Amid the failure of the Virtual Boy and the launch of the more successful Game Boy Pocket, Yokoi left Nintendo on 15 August 1996, after thirty-one years at the company. Leaving with several of his subordinates to form a new company called Koto, Yokoi led the development of the Bandai WonderSwan handheld game console.<ref name="DNA">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="Nintendo Key Figures">Template:Cite web</ref>

Design philosophy

Yokoi said "The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply."<ref name="Game Over by David Sheff"/> He articulated his philosophy of Template:Nihongo (also translated as "Lateral Thinking with Seasoned Technology"), in the book Yokoi Gunpei Game House. "Withered technology" in this context refers to mature technologies which are well understood and tend to be more affordable and reliable. "Lateral thinking" refers to finding innovative ways of using such technology. Yokoi held that toys and games do not necessarily require cutting-edge technology; novel and fun gameplay are more important. In the interview, he suggested that expensive cutting-edge technology can get in the way of developing a new product.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

The Game & Watch was developed based on this philosophy.<ref>Ryan, Jeff. Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America. Penguin. 2011.</ref> At the time of its development, Sharp and Casio were fiercely competing in the digital calculator market. For this reason, there was a glut of liquid crystal displays and semiconductors. The "lateral thinking" was to find an original and fun use for this cheap and abundant technology. The NES and Game Boy were developed under a similar philosophy.<ref name=parish>Parish, Jeremy. The Troubled Past and Challenging Future of Nintendo 3DS: What the 3DS owes to Virtual Boy (and how it's different) Template:Webarchive. 1up.com. 31 March 2011.</ref> In the handheld market, Yokoi's refusal to equip the Game Boy with a color LCD display (at the time, cutting-edge technology) gave the device a much longer battery life and is often cited as a primary reason it prevailed against Sega's Game Gear and Atari's Lynx.<ref name=parish/>

Satoru Iwata, CEO of Nintendo from 2002 until his death in 2015, claimed that this philosophy has been passed on to the disciples of Yokoi, such as Miyamoto, and it continues to be echoed in later Nintendo products like the highly successful Wii.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The Wii's internal technology was similar to that of Nintendo's previous home console, the GameCube, and was not as advanced in terms of computational capability and multimedia versatility compared to its competitors: the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Instead, the system offered something completely different by introducing motion-based controls to the console market in an attempt to change the ways video games are played, and consequently, to widen the audience for video games in general. This strategy demonstrated Nintendo's belief that graphical advancement isn't the only way to make progress in gaming technology; indeed, after the Wii's overwhelming success, Sony and Microsoft released their own motion control peripherals. Nintendo's emphasis on peripherals for the Wii has also been pointed to as an example of Yokoi's "lateral thinking" at work.<ref>Jones, Steven E. and Thiruvathukal, George K. Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform. MIT Press. 2012.</ref>

Death

On 4 October 1997, Yokoi was riding in a car driven by his associate Etsuo Kiso on the Hokuriku Expressway, when the vehicle rear-ended a truck.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name=kotaku /> After the two men had left the car to inspect the damage, Yokoi was hit and injured by a passing car. The driver of the car that hit Yokoi in the second accident was Gen Tsushima, a member of the tourism industry.<ref name=kotaku>Template:Cite web</ref> Yokoi's death was confirmed two hours later,<ref name="escapist" /><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> his only serious injury being a fractured rib.<ref name=EGM102/> Though the whereabouts of Yokoi's ashes have not been publicly disclosed, his tombstone is known to have been designed by Miyamoto, who also eulogized him at his funeral, and lists several of his lifetime achievements for Nintendo over the years, from Ultra Machine to Game Boy.<ref>Virtual Boy: NOT Nintendo's Biggest Failure</ref>

Legacy

The title of his main biography from 2010 translates from Japanese as Father of Games – Gunpei Yokoi, the Man Who Created Nintendo's DNA.<ref name="DNA"/> A 1997 book's title translates to Yokoi's House of Gaming,<ref name="House of Gaming">Template:Cite book</ref> which was explored in English in 2010 by Tokyo Scum Brigade.<ref name="TSB Gunpei">Template:Cite web</ref> A 2014 book about him is Gunpei Yokoi: The Life & Philosophy of Nintendo's God of Toys.<ref name="God of Toys">Template:Cite book</ref>

In 2003, Yokoi posthumously received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Game Developers Association.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> GameTrailers placed him on their lists for the "Top Ten Game Creators".<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> An art gallery in Japan created an art exhibit in 2010 titled "The Man Who Was Called the God of Games" featuring all his key Nintendo works.<ref name="Exhibit in Harakuju">Template:Cite web</ref> In 1999, Bandai began releasing a series of handheld puzzle games named Gunpey as a tribute to their original creator, Yokoi.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Works

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Producer

References

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