Gunpei Yokoi started at Nintendo as its maintenance department, and for several months, according to David Sheff’s Game Over, he was the whole of it. His job was to keep the machines that printed playing cards running. Thirty years later he had given Nintendo its first toy hit, the Game & Watch handhelds, the cross-shaped control pad that went on to the NES, and the Game Boy. His last machine for Nintendo, the Virtual Boy, was its most public failure. He left in 1996, started his own company, and was killed on a Japanese road the following year.
The Ultra Hand
Yokoi grew up in Kyoto, where his father ran a pharmaceutical company, and studied electronics; Retro Gamer names his university as Doshisha, in Kyoto. After college he went round Kyoto’s companies filling in application forms, and Nintendo, still a playing-card maker, took him on to look after its assembly-line machinery.
In his spare time he built gadgets from spare parts. One was a wooden lattice that shot out and closed a grip on the end when its handles were squeezed together. Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo’s president, was setting up a new department called Games to find products beyond cards. As Sheff tells it, he called Yokoi into his office and told him to make something for Christmas. “What should I make?” Yokoi asked. “Something great,” said Yamauchi. The next day Yokoi showed him the lattice. It went on sale as the Ultra Hand, and sold 1.2 million at about 800 yen each.
Sources disagree about the dates. Edge’s 1995 profile and N64 Magazine’s 1997 history have Yokoi hired or moved into Games in 1969 and the Ultra Hand selling in 1970. Later histories, including Retro Gamer in 2004 and Wireframe in 2022, say he joined in 1965 and the Ultra Hand came out in 1966.
More toys followed. The Ultra Machine pitched a light ball that could be batted safely indoors, and sold 700,000 a year for three years. The Ultra Scope was a periscope for looking round corners. The Love Tester had two handles: a boy and a girl each held one, then joined their free hands, and a meter measured the current passing through them, “with scientific inaccuracy” in Sheff’s words, to show how much love there was between them. Yokoi pointed out that the real point was the hand-holding, which was still slightly daring in Japan at the time.
His department took on young engineers. One was Masayuki Uemura, who came from Sharp selling solar cells; Yokoi saw that a small cell could work as a light sensor, and the two built Nintendo’s light guns.
Game & Watch and the cross pad
By the late 1970s pocket calculators were cheap and everywhere. “The Nintendo way of adapting technology,” Yokoi told Sheff, “is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply.” His team put a single game and a clock on a calculator-sized LCD, using parts from Sharp, and called it Game & Watch. The first, Ball, went on sale in April 1980; sales picked up with Fire that July. According to Retro Gamer, the range ran to 59 games and sold more than 43 million units over 11 years. It ran on button-cell batteries, the kind used in watches and calculators, which were small and cheap to replace.
Yokoi later called this approach “lateral thinking of withered technology”: using well-understood, cheap parts in new ways. Retro Gamer dates the phrase to the Game & Watch years, and Nintendo still quotes it.
The handhelds also needed a control that did not stick out of the case. Donkey Kong Jr. (1982) had four separate buttons arranged in a cross. The multi-screen Donkey Kong Game & Watch of the same year joined them into a single cross-shaped pad, the D-pad, which Nintendo then used on the NES controller and the Game Boy.
Yokoi also supervised young designers. When he needed games for Game & Watch, Yamauchi lent him Shigeru Miyamoto: “I asked him to do creation and I would supervise,” Yokoi told Sheff. He oversaw the arcade Donkey Kong too, and Sheff says he turned down many of Miyamoto’s ideas for it, so that the characters did simpler things than Miyamoto wanted.
R&D1 and its games
Yokoi’s group became Research and Development 1 (R&D1). Besides hardware, it made games for the Famicom. Asked about R&D1’s work in 1995, Yokoi listed “the Game Boy, and also software for the Famicom and Super Famicom such as the Metroid series”. Metroid came out on the Famicom Disk System on 6 August 1986, with Yokoi as producer. Who directed it is disputed: Retro Gamer names Yoshio Sakamoto, while the game’s own credits list Satoru Okada as chief director (see the Metroid entry); Retro Gamer describes Sakamoto setting out to make something unlike the games of Miyamoto’s team. Yokoi is also credited as producer of Kid Icarus (1986). Months after he left Nintendo, Computer and Video Games described him as the man “who originated the excellent Metroid series”.
The Game Boy
The Game Boy, launched in 1989, combined the two things Nintendo already knew how to make. In Sheff’s description, Yokoi’s 45-strong R&D1 team “married the NES and Game & Watch”: a cartridge console small enough to carry, with a greenish liquid-crystal screen made by Sharp. In America it cost $100, and Yamauchi predicted 25 million sales in three years. Sheff reports 200,000 sold out in two weeks in Japan and 40,000 sold on the first day in the United States; Retro Gamer gives a higher Japanese figure, 300,000 on the first day.
The screen was monochrome and it blurred when things moved fast. Accounts differ on who chose it: Retro Gamer says Nintendo executives pressed Yokoi for colour, while Sheff credits the decision to Yamauchi on grounds of cost and battery life. Sheff gives the arithmetic as four or eight AA batteries for colour against the Game Boy’s two, but the machine actually took four: Computer and Video Games reported in July 1989 that it “takes four AA-sized batteries”. The colour handhelds that Atari and NEC released instead were expensive, and sold a small fraction of the Game Boy’s numbers. Nintendo’s own figures put the Game Boy family at 118.69 million units.
The Virtual Boy
Yokoi’s next machine was the Virtual Boy, a 3D viewer on a table-top stand with a red display. He told Edge in 1995 that about 60 people in R&D1 were working on it. The display technology came from a company called Reflection Technology, which had approached Nintendo about three years earlier with no particular product in mind. Nintendo’s idea was to use two separate screens, one for each eye, to make a 3D image. A head-mounted design was dropped, partly out of worry about the dangers and partly, Yokoi said, because “if a woman wearing make-up was to use the head-mounted design, the next person might be hesitant in wearing it!” The machine ran on six AA batteries for about seven hours, and Nintendo told the Japanese press it would sell three million in its first year.
It went on sale in Japan on 21 July 1995, at around the same time as the PlayStation and Saturn. Yokoi had argued that players were getting bored of ordinary television screens. Edge later said simply that “he was wrong”: the Virtual Boy flopped, and shops ended up selling its cartridges for ¥98.
Leaving Nintendo
In October 1996 Computer and Video Games reported that Yokoi had left Nintendo, and that the reasons, whether the Virtual Boy, arguments or retirement, had not been revealed. Edge passed on a rumour that he had been moved out of active work in R&D1 after the Virtual Boy and had left because of it. N64 Magazine said he had left “under something of a cloud”.
By January 1997 he had his own company, Koto. He said Nintendo had grown so big that it could only bring out major products, and that after 30 years there he had many ideas he wanted to turn into things people could buy. Koto had six products in development, none of them for the new consoles. One, reported by Edge in August 1997, was a pocket LCD game about feeding and looking after a snake, made with a company called Hiro.
Koto’s best-known product came out after his death. Bandai asked him to design a handheld, and the result was the WonderSwan, released in Japan in 1999. Retro Gamer describes it as typical Yokoi: a monochrome screen chosen for battery life, a design that could be played held either way up, and a puzzle game named after him. It sold 1.55 million in Japan.
His death
On 4 October 1997 Yokoi was in a minor collision with the car in front. While he was looking at the damage at the side of the road, a passing car hit him, and he died in hospital a couple of hours later. He was 56. Computer and Video Games dedicated its December 1997 issue to him, and N64 Magazine noted that his Game Boy was, at that moment, keeping Nintendo in profit in Japan.
Sources
- David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999): chapter 2, “In Heaven’s Hands” (his background and hiring, “Something great”, the Ultra Hand and its sales, the Ultra Machine, Ultra Scope and Love Tester, Uemura and the light guns, Game & Watch and “mature technology”, supervising Miyamoto and Donkey Kong); “From Russia With Love” (the Game Boy, R&D1’s 45-strong team, its price, Yamauchi’s prediction and the decision against colour, and early sales); GamePress edition chapter 1, “Riding the Hardware See-Saw” (the Virtual Boy, Koto and his death).
- Edge issue 18, March 1995, Gumpei Yokoi interview: hired in 1969, the Ultra Hand in 1970, R&D1’s work including the Metroid series, and the Virtual Boy.
- Edge issue 48, August 1997, “Where are they now?”: the Virtual Boy’s failure, cartridges at ¥98, the rumour about his departure, and the snake game with Hiro.
- N64 Magazine issue 2, May 1997, Nintendo history feature: Yokoi and the Games division in 1969, the Ultra Hand, Ultra Machine and Love Tester.
- N64 Magazine issue 9, December 1997, news: his death, and the Game Boy keeping Nintendo in profit.
- Nintendo Power issue 103, December 1997, Player’s Pulse: the date of his death.
- Computer and Video Games issue 179, October 1996 (his departure); issue 182, January 1997 (Koto); issue 185, April 1997, letters (“originated the excellent Metroid series”); issue 193, December 1997 (his death and the dedication).
- Retro Gamer issue 10, 2004, Game & Watch feature: joining in 1965, Ball (April 1980) and Fire (July 1980).
- Computer and Video Games, July 1989: Game Boy preview, “takes four AA-sized batteries”.
- Retro Gamer issue 55, 2008, Game & Watch “Retroinspection”: “Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology”, Donkey Kong Jr.’s cross of buttons, button-cell batteries.
- Retro Gamer issue 108, November 2012: the Virtual Boy’s debut on 21 July. Issue 109, December 2012: Yokoi as the man behind Kid Icarus and Metroid. Issue 114, May 2013: 59 Game & Watch games and more than 43 million units.
- Retro Gamer Collection volume 4, 2010: Metroid feature (Doshisha University, Sakamoto as director, the Famicom Disk System release on 6 August 1986); Game Boy feature (the D-pad, 300,000 on the first day in Japan, executives pressing for colour, his departure).
- Retro Gamer: Videogames Hardware Handbook volume 2, 2010: the WonderSwan, Koto and Bandai, the puzzle game named after him, 1.55 million sales, and his age at death.
- Wireframe issue 63, May 2022, “From cards to cartridges”: joining in 1965 and the Ultra Hand in 1966.
- Lotek64 issue 16, December 2005: his death on 4 October 1997, 18 months before the WonderSwan.
- Nintendo Co., Ltd., Investor Relations, “Dedicated Video Game Sales Units”: Game Boy family 118.69 million (web). https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/hard_soft/index.html
- Nintendo, “Ask the Developer Vol. 16: Nintendo Switch 2, Part 2”, footnote 14: “lateral thinking of withered technology” (web). https://www.nintendo.com/us/whatsnew/ask-the-developer-vol-16-nintendo-switch-2-part-2/
- Wikipedia, “Gunpei Yokoi” (web, secondary): date of birth; producer credits on Metroid and Kid Icarus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi