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Gunpei Yokoi
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Gunpei Yokoi, also spelled (September 10 1941October 4 1997), was a long-time Nintendo employee, creator of the Game Boy, and producer of the long-running Metroid series.
ei Yokoi began working at Nintendo in 1965, after graduating college with a degree in electronics from Doshisha University.
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Encyclopedia
Gunpei Yokoi, also spelled (September 10 1941October 4 1997), was a long-time Nintendo employee, creator of the Game Boy, and producer of the long-running Metroid series.
Nintendo
Toys
Gunpei Yokoi began working at Nintendo in 1965, after 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 miniature remote-controlled vacuum cleaner called the Chiritory, 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. After viewing a bored business-man playing with a calculator on a bullet-train, Yokoi invented a prototype.The initial result was Nintendo's popular Game & Watch series of handhelds. 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, a controller part that consists of four buttons grouped in a + shape which correspond to the directions up, down, left, and right. In most games this is used to control the direction of certain objects.
The Game & Watch series saw 59 titles between 1980 and 1991. 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 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) alongside them. Yokoi was also responsible for hiring the man who would later become legendary for designing the Famicom/NES and Super Famicom/SNES- Masayuki Uemura.
R&D1 was also responsible for the Robotic Operating Buddy (R.O.B.) accessory for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
The remaining members of R&D1 remained with Yokoi, and they began developing what became 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 is a small handheld which 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 had all the portability of the Game & Watch titles but with the cartridge interchanging capabilities of the Famicom. During its Game & Watch days, Nintendo had marketed the handhelds at an affordable price, while keeping a standard of high quality.
One of the Game Boy's lasting strategies was 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, TurboExpress 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. Yokoi's persistence saw the Game Boy, with a larger game library and longer battery life, dominate the handheld market, while the color screen Game Gear, TurboExpress and Atari Lynx failed due to high battery consumption, expensive purchase price and less games.
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 monochromatic; 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 two AA (compared to four 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. The team had been assigned to develop exclusively for the Game Boy. Some of these include the Super Mario Land series, Metroid II: Return of Samus, and the puzzle game 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, he lost some status 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 3D, 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 performed poorly 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 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.
After Nintendo
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, two years after his death.
Death
On October 4 1997, Yokoi was involved 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, a passing car sideswiped them. Yokoi was grievously injured and pronounced dead two hours later. He was 56. 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.
Games designed
Game designer
Game producer
General manager
Involvement in the Metroid series
Yokoi was the producer of Nintendo's Metroid series, the first game of which was released in 1986, combining the side-scrolling aspects of Super Mario Bros. and item collecting and non-linearity of The Legend of Zelda. The third game in the Metroid series, Super Metroid, was released in 1994, and was the last he worked on before his death in 1997. The first Metroid games after Yokoi's death, Metroid Fusion and Metroid Prime, were released simultaneously on 15 November 2002. Metroid Fusion, developed by Nintendo, is similar in appearance and gameplay to Super Metroid, while Metroid Prime, developed by Retro Studios, is the first 3D, first-person Metroid game.
Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology
Yokoi articulated his philosophy of in the book, , 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 using such technology. Yokoi held that toys and games do not necessarily require cutting edge technology; novel and fun gameplay are more important. In the interview he suggested that expensive cutting edge technology can get 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, which was compensated by the licensing fee from sales of games. Nintendo's failure to adopt compact disc technology instead of cartridges for the Nintendo 64 was cited as the main reason rival PlayStation gained the upper hand in the 5th generation 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.
Satoru Iwata, the current CEO of Nintendo claim that this philosophy is still part of Nintendo as it has been passed on to the disciples of Yokoi, such as Miyamoto and it continues to show itself in Nintendo's current use of technology with the Nintendo DS handheld system and the newest home gaming console, the Wii. The Wii's internal technology is mostly the same as the previous game system, the GameCube, and is far behind the computational powers and multimedia versatility of other competing video game consoles in the seventh generation; still being the only one to focus primarily on motion-based controls. The DS uses ARM processors at relatively low clock speeds and has far less computational power compared to Sony's competing PSP, yet has many features of modern technology built in (such as 802.11b, compatibility with Game Boy Advance games and touchscreen functionality).
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