The accidental inventor
Gunpei Yokoi joined Nintendo in 1965 as a maintenance engineer, responsible for keeping the company's Hanafuda playing card manufacturing equipment running. He was bored. On his lunch breaks he built small toys with the factory's machinery. Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo's president, discovered one of Yokoi's toys — an extendable arm with a gripping claw — and asked him to develop it into a commercial product. The Ultra Hand sold 1.2 million units in 1966. Yokoi's career as a toy and game designer had begun without him intending it.
Yokoi went on to design or oversee the design of the Game & Watch series (1980), the D-pad controller (used on the Game & Watch and later the NES), the Game Boy (1989), and the Virtual Boy (1995). He was also the producer of Metroid (1986) and Kid Icarus (1986), acting as creative director for the R&D1 division that Shigeru Miyamoto's R&D4 competed with internally. Nintendo's most significant hardware and some of its most important games from the 1980s came from Yokoi's group.
The philosophy: withered technology
Yokoi's design philosophy is usually translated into English as "lateral thinking with withered technology." The phrase is more interesting in its original Japanese context. "Withered" technology (枯れた技術, kareta gijutsu) doesn't mean broken or obsolete — it means mature, fully understood, cheap to manufacture, and reliable. Technology that has been on the market long enough that its failure modes are known, its manufacturing costs have stabilised, and its properties are fully understood by engineers.
Yokoi's argument was that the interesting design problem was not using the latest, most expensive technology — that was simply a matter of having budget and engineering resources. The interesting problem was using mature, cheap technology in ways that nobody had thought of before. Lateral thinking was the other half of the equation: not applying technology to its obvious purpose, but asking what else it could do.
The Game & Watch exemplified this philosophy perfectly. The LCD technology used in calculators was mature, cheap, reliable, and well-understood. Yokoi put it in a clamshell game device with a clock. The technology was not new. The application was. The result was a product that Nintendo could manufacture at low cost and sell at a price that reached an audience a more technically ambitious product couldn't. The Game & Watch sold over 43 million units across 60 different games from 1980 to 1991.
The Game Boy and the competitors it beat
The Game Boy launched in 1989 and was immediately and repeatedly declared inferior to its competitors. The Sega Game Gear (1990) had a colour backlit screen, a faster processor, and superior technical specifications by almost every measure. The Atari Lynx (1989) had a colour display and impressive hardware. The NEC TurboExpress (1990) could play actual TurboGrafx-16 game cards. All three were better gaming machines than the Game Boy in straightforward hardware terms.
The Game Boy had a monochrome screen, a slow processor, and could produce only four shades of green. It also had thirty-five hours of battery life on four AA batteries, compared to the Game Gear's five hours on six AA batteries. This single difference determined the market. Portable gaming happened in cars, on planes, in situations where power was unavailable and battery life was the critical constraint. A device that required fresh batteries every five hours was not, in practice, a portable device for most users in most situations.
Yokoi had applied his philosophy precisely: the monochrome LCD technology was mature and cheap and consumed little power. The colour display technology that competitors used was newer, more expensive, and power-hungry. The technically inferior choice was the commercially correct one because it matched the actual use case of the product — sustained portable gaming — better than the technically superior alternatives did.
The Virtual Boy and the limits of the philosophy
The Virtual Boy (1995) was Yokoi's most visible failure. A stereoscopic 3D gaming device displayed through two red LED arrays, worn like goggles or placed on a table, the Virtual Boy was intended to provide an immersive 3D experience using mature red LED technology at low cost. The application of the withered technology philosophy was coherent: LEDs were cheap, reliable, and power-efficient; the stereoscopic display concept was not new; the combination was within Nintendo's manufacturing capability at a reasonable price point.
The problem was that the product made players feel ill. The fixed focal distance of the displays, the monochromatic red image, and the neck strain of the goggle design produced headaches and nausea in extended use. Yokoi apparently had reservations about the product and reportedly wanted more development time. Nintendo released it anyway, perhaps under commercial pressure. It sold fewer than 800,000 units worldwide before being discontinued.
Yokoi left Nintendo in 1996, his departure connected to the Virtual Boy's failure in ways that were never made fully explicit publicly. He founded his own company, Koto Laboratory, and was working on the WonderSwan handheld for Bandai when he died in a road accident in 1997. The Game Boy continued to dominate the handheld market until the Game Boy Advance replaced it in 2001 — an eighteen-year reign for the device whose specification sheet his competitors had openly mocked in 1989.