Gunpei Yokoi

Gunpei Yokoi, also seen as Gumpei Yokoi (横井 軍平) (September 10, 1941–October 4, 1997) was one of the most important figures in the history of the video game company Nintendo.

Toys


Gunpei Yokoi began working at Nintendo in 1965, after barely graduating college with a degree in electronics from Doshisha University. Yokoi started out working on the assembly line for the Hanafuda cards as a maintenance engineer.

In 1970, Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo at the time, came to a hanafuda factory Yokoi was working at and took notice of a toy, an extending arm, which Yokoi made for his own amusement during spare time as the company's janitor and machine maintenance man. Yamauchi ordered Yokoi to develop it as a proper product for the Christmas rush. The Ultra Hand was a huge success, selling approximately 1.2 million units. Yokoi was soon moved from maintenance duty to product development. Yokoi went on to develop many other toys during Nintendo's toy era, including the Ten Billion Barrel puzzle, a baseball throwing machine called the Ultra Machine, and a Love Tester. Another invention of his, in collaboration with Masayuki Uemura from Sharp, was the Nintendo Beam Gun Games, the precursor to the NES Zapper.

Game & Watch
When Nintendo eventually began selling video games, Yamauchi asked Yokoi to come up with products in this field. The initial result was Nintendo's popular Game & Watch series of handhelds (for information on what inspired Yokoi to make the game & watch series, see Game & Watch). Game & Watch games were individual handheld games which featured an LCD-display. Some consider the small handhelds to be a prototype of the Game Boy, which would be released later and prove to be Yokoi's greatest work. These games also featured a "control-cross," which many video game enthusiasts today know as the D-Pad.

The Game & Watch series saw 59 titles between 1980 and 1986. Many popular arcade games were translated into Game & Watch titles, including Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., which Yokoi helped to create alongside Shigeru Miyamoto. Many of these Game & Watch titles were put onto large compilations for the Game Boy series of handhelds, and included classic as well as reinvented versions of Ball, Flagman, Oil Panic, and Fire among other titles. These are known as the Game & Watch Gallery series.

Research & Development 1
Nintendo began assigning its chief engineers to head their own divisions as the electronic industry boomed in the late seventies. Yokoi was appointed to the general manager of the Research and Development 1 (R&D1) group. R&D1 consisted of 55 designers, programmers, and engineers. It was with this group that Yokoi came up with many new ideas for Nintendo as it entered into the video games market.

Before Miyamoto got his own R&D department in 1984, Gunpei Yokoi helped to produce many of his famous arcade games, such as like Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and the original Mario Bros.. In 1985, Yokoi and his R&D department were responsible for Kid Icarus, as well as the first title in one of Nintendo's longest running series, Metroid. Later in 1986, a part of Yokoi's R&D1 group branched off to form Intelligent Systems, and Yokoi later produced Battle Clash, Panel de Pon (scored by Masaya Kuzume), and Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu (scored by Yuka Tsujiyoko) along-side them. He is also the creator of Princess Daisy

R&D1 was also responsible for the Robotic Operating Buddy (R.O.B.) accessory for the Famicom.

The remaining members of R&D1 remained with Yokoi, and they began developing what would become one of Nintendo's most profitable products, the Game Boy.

Game Boy
Yokoi's perhaps most notable work in the hardware area was the Game Boy handheld, released in 1989. The Game Boy was a small, although bulky, handheld that appeared to be the successor to the Game & Watch games. However, the Game Boy played numerous games through cartridge-based gameplay, and presented games on a monochromatic screen (essentially black and green). In short, it was all the portability of the Game & Watch titles but with the cartridge interchanging capabilities of the Famicom. During its Game & Watch days, Nintendo marketed the handhelds at an affordable price, while keeping a standard of high quality, which transitioned into the Game Boy. This marketing technique has proven very effective for Nintendo, and has helped it to beat many competitors.

One of the Game Boy's longest traditions has been to provide the user with an affordable product with a decent battery life. Even though higher-ups at Nintendo wanted a full-color screen version of the Game Boy (because other competitors like the Game Gear and Atari Lynx were full-color handhelds), Yokoi refused to release a color version until technology permitted a color handheld that would last a significant period under the power of a few batteries. Indeed, Yokoi's standard of high quality saw the Game Boy, with a superior game library and long battery life, dominate the handheld market while the color screen Game Gear and Atari Lynx failed due to high battery consumption and expensive purchase price.

Yokoi and Nintendo even played a joke on fans who demanded a color Game Boy by revealing a line of Game Boys which had been painted various colors on the outside. The screen was still colorless; the change was merely cosmetic. In 1996, the Game Boy Pocket updated the monochrome screen with a true black-and-white one and slimmer profile.

Finally, in 1998, the Game Boy Color was released, a full-color version of the Game Boy. Keeping with the late Yokoi's standards, the Game Boy Color required 2 AA (compared to 4 AA for the original) batteries and had approximately the same battery consumption rate.

Many games for the Game Boy were developed by Yokoi and R&D1. Due to its success, they were assigned to develop exclusively for the Game Boy. Some of them include the Super Mario Land series, Metroid II: Return of Samus, and the puzzler Dr. Mario.

Virtual Boy
Gunpei Yokoi had become one of Nintendo's most respected members with his developing of the Game Boy alongside his other achievements. However, his success was shadowed by a dark period when he developed the Virtual Boy, a home console which presented games in red and black. While the Virtual Boy did present a level of 3-D, the red presented by the machine often irritated many players' eyes, and the machine itself was also fairly uncomfortable to use. The system also had a very small library. As a result, the Virtual Boy flopped in both Japan and North America and was subsequently never released in Europe. Yokoi was crushed by the Virtual Boy's failure and the disaster had many at Nintendo questioning Yokoi's capabilities. According to an episode of Icons (later changed to Game Makers) on the G4 TV channel, Yokoi was treated as an outcast before handing in his resignation on August 15, 1996, only days after the Game Boy Pocket was released.

Koto Laboratory
Soon after he left Nintendo, Yokoi began the company Koto Laboratory in Kyoto. There he began development of the WonderSwan, a handheld developed in partnership between Koto and Bandai. Yokoi never saw the final product of the WonderSwan, which was released in 1999, long after his death. The first game released for the WonderSwan was named "Gunpey" in his honor.

Death
On October 4, 1997, Yokoi was killed in a car accident. He was riding in a car driven by Etsuo Kiso, a businessman from Nintendo. After a minor car accident involving a truck, Kiso and Yokoi pulled over to examine the damage of the two automobiles. While examining, two cars rammed into the broken down car from either side, crushing Yokoi. Yokoi was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead two hours later. Kiso suffered two badly broken bones and severe whiplash.

Awards and recognition

 * Yokoi posthumously received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony on March 6, 2003.
 * G4 ran an episode of Game Makers with the Game Boy as the topic. Much of the episode talks about Yokoi, his position prior to the Game Boy, and his death.

Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology
Yokoi articulated his philosophy of "Lateral thinking of withered technology" in the book, Yokoi Gunpei Game House (横井軍平ゲーム館), which consists of a collection of interviews). Withered technology in this context refers to a mature technology which is cheap and well understood. Lateral thinking refers to finding radical new ways of utilizing such technology. Yokoi held that toys and games do not necessarily require cutting edge technology; novel and fun game play are more important. In the interview he went as far as to suggest that expensive cutting edge technology sometimes gets in the way of developing a new product.

Game & Watch was developed based on this philosophy. At the time of its development, Sharp and Casio were fiercely competing in the digital calculator market. For this reason, there was 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 Game Boy, NES, and SNES were all developed under a similar philosophy. However, this strategy has not always been successful. When video game consoles entered the 4th and 5th generation, Sony and later Microsoft adopted a strategy of embracing cutting edge technology and selling their console at a loss to create market share. Nintendo's failure to adopt compact discs instead of cartridges for the Nintendo 64 was cited as the main reason rival PlayStation gained the upper hand in the console market. On the other hand, in the handheld market, Yokoi's refusal to adopt a color display for the Game Boy in favor of long battery life is cited as the main reason it prevailed against Sega's Game Gear and the Atari Lynx.