The Life and Legacy of Gunpei Yokoi

     Gunpei Yokoi was a video game designer and a long-time employee of Nintendo. Yokoi was best known for being the creator of the D-Pad and the Game & Watch along with designing the original Game Boy. Along with hardware, Yokoi was also the producer of some Nintendo games such as Metroid, Donkey Kong, and Super Mario Land. Gunpei Yokoi is an all-time Nintendo legend but sadly passed away on October 4, 1997, at the age of 56 years old. In this post, I want to talk about the life and legacy of Gunpei Yokoi, a Nintendo legend.

     Yokoi was born on September 10, 1941, in Kyoto, Japan during World War II. As a young adult, Yokoi graduated from Doshisha University with a degree in Electronics. Gunpei was hired by Nintendo in 1965 as an electrition to help maintain the assembly line for Hanafuda card manufacturing. In his free time, he started working on an extending arm toy. On a visit to the factory, Hiroshi Yamauchi (President and CEO of Nintendo from 1949 to 2002) noticed the project that Yokoi was working on in his free time and ordered him to have it manufactured as an official product of Nintendo. This new toy was to be called the Ultra hand and it was set to be released during the holiday season just in time for Christmas. Yokoi's Ultra Hand toy became a huge success for Nintendo and Yamauchi put him in charge of working on other toys

    Some of the other toys that Yokoi worked on included the Ultra Machine, Love Tester, and a Ten Billion Barrel puzzle. He worked on these toys until 1974 when he saw a businessman messing around with a calculator on the train. This is when Gunpei got the idea to combine a clock with a video game. This clock/video game idea became the Game and Watch. The Game and Watch was a small handheld device that used a screen similar to a calculator and featured one game and a clock. Yokoi later created the directional pad (D-pad) in 1982 with the introduction of the Donkey Kong version of the Game and Watch. In 1981, Yokoi was appointed to supervise the development of an upcoming arcade game created by Shigeru Miyamoto called Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong was a huge success in the arcades and Yokoi continued to work with Miyamoto. The next arcade game that they worked on was Mario Bros.

    After working on these arcade games, Gunpei started working in Nintendo Research and Development 1 (Nintendo R&D1). In R&D1, Yokoi helped produce many games such as Kid Icarus and Metroid. Later in 1982, Yokoi filed a patent for the Game Boy. The first prototype of Nintendo's first full-on handheld video game console was shown off in 1987. The Game Boy was first released in April 1989 in Japan and July of that same year in North America. The Game Boy was different than other handheld video game consoles from around this time (Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx, etc.) as it did not feature a colored screen or a backlight. Instead, Nintendo opted to have no light in the Game Boy screen with only black and gray graphics. Nintendo decided to go this route to have better battery life and save on costs that they could pass down to customers. To help make the screen easier to see, Nintendo made the screen a pea-green color to help the black pixel have better visibility. After the success of the Game Boy, Yokoi started working on the Virtual Boy, a 3D Virtual Reality-like device. Because Nintendo was ahead of its time with VR and 3D, the Virtual Boy was too ahead of its time and sold poorly. Headaches caused by the Virtual Boy because of prolonged use didn't help sell potential customers on the device. Apparently, Gunpei didn't want the Virtual Boy to be released in its current form but Nintendo wanted to start focusing on the development of the N64 so they rushed it to the market.

        The last device that Yokoi worked on for Nintendo was the Game Boy Pocket. the Game Boy Pocket was a smaller-sized Game Boy which ditched the pea-green screen for a black and gray screen. Gunpei decided to leave Nintendo partially to do with the failure of the Virtual Boy and in 1996, he started his own company called Koto Laboratory. Yokoi started Koto Laboratory to develop a new handheld called the WanderSwan. Koto Laboratory and Yokoi developed the WanderSwan in collaboration with Bandai.

     On October 1997, Gunpei was riding in the passenger seat of a car with one of his associates. When the car accidentally rear-ended a truck, the two men got out of the car to assess the damage of the crash. This is when Yokoi was hit and injured by a passing car. Yokoi's death was confirmed two hours later. Gunpei Yokoi was 56 years old when he tragically passed away.

    Gunpei Yokoi will always be remembered as a legendary member of Nintendo R&D1 and Nintendo in general. Yokoi ushered in a new era for Nintendo, taking them from a playing card company to a toy company and then to a video game giant. Without Gunpei's idea of the D-pad and the creation of the original Game Boy, Nintendo would not be the same company we know and love today.