Gunpei Yokoi

Japan · Born 1941 · Nintendo · Game Designer / Hardware Engineer

Gunpei Yokoi invented the Game Boy and the Game & Watch handheld series, and produced Metroid, establishing Nintendo's philosophy of "lateral thinking with withered technology."

Gunpei Yokoi joined Nintendo in 1965 as a maintenance engineer for the company's hanafuda playing-card machines, years before Nintendo entered the video game business. His career took its decisive turn in 1966 when Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi noticed a mechanical toy Yokoi had built from an extendable arm to amuse himself on the assembly line. Yamauchi ordered it into production as the Ultra Hand, which became a major commercial success and established Yokoi as Nintendo's hardware inventor. Over the following decade he developed dozens of toy and electronic products, including the Love Tester and the Beam Gun light-gun toys, before leading Nintendo's entry into portable electronic games with the Game & Watch line beginning in 1980. The clamshell design of the Game & Watch Multi-Screen models directly influenced the layout of Nintendo's later handheld hardware. Yokoi's central design philosophy, which he called "lateral thinking with withered technology," held that mature, inexpensive technology used creatively produced better consumer products than cutting-edge hardware used conventionally. This principle guided every major project he oversaw. The Game Boy (1989), which he designed and shepherded to market, used a low-power monochrome LCD screen at a time when competitors like the Sega Game Gear were offering colour displays. The Game Boy's inferior screen was outweighed by its battery life of around 30 hours on four AAs and its $89 price point, and it outsold all colour rivals combined. The same thinking governed the NES controller's d-pad, which Yokoi derived from a Game & Watch directional control and which became the universal standard for digital game input. Yokoi produced or oversaw many of Nintendo's most significant early titles: Metroid (1986), developed by Nintendo R&D1 under his supervision, introduced a non-linear exploration structure and an atmospheric sci-fi aesthetic entirely unlike anything in Nintendo's Mario- and Zelda-dominated catalogue. He also produced the Kid Icarus series and served as executive producer on the original Game Boy launch titles. As a hardware engineer he held dozens of patents and trained a generation of Nintendo designers who would go on to lead the company's handheld division. Yokoi left Nintendo in 1996 following the commercial failure of the Virtual Boy, a stereoscopic 3D headset he had championed that proved too expensive and physically uncomfortable for the mass market. He founded Koto Laboratory and was developing a new handheld, the WonderSwan, with Bandai when he died in a road accident in 1997. His legacy is the portable gaming industry itself: without the Game & Watch and Game Boy, neither the DS, PSP, nor smartphone gaming market would have developed as they did. His philosophy of humble, durable, affordable hardware remains the template for Nintendo's hardware strategy to this day.