Lateral Thinker: Gunpei Yokoi
Nintendo’s quiet achiever, and the portable pioneer’s forgotten tilt at Virtual Reality.
August 2016
BY SAM MORTIMER
A smile washed over the face of Hiroshi Yamauchi, the President of Nintendo, as 28-year-old Gunpei Yokoi demonstrated his collapsible hand contraption. It was 1966, and Yamauchi had instructed the young tinkerer to create “something great” for Nintendo’s newly created Games division to market during the Christmas holidays. A simple wooden-latticed hand extension he’d created for fun, the 800-yen Ultra Hand was an overwhelming success, shipping 1.2 million units.
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Not bad for a guy who, just some weeks earlier, was the maintenance department for Nintendo’s assembly line of hanafuda card printing machines.
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Nintendo’s Kyoto office was a hub of invention over the next few years as Yokoi toiled with toys. A scope that could see around walls, an inside-friendly baseball launcher (released in Australia as “Slugger Mate”), and a ‘love tester’ that was essentially nothing more than a tarted up multimeter; novelty products that were all successful, and each more so than the last. Yokoi was an inventor with a degree in electronics, and each experiment was fulfilling a whim of his imagination. “It was a time of great fun,” he recalls. “I saw myself as a cartoonist who understood movements in the world and created abstractions of them.”
Pictured: A young Gunpei Yokoi.
Pictured: The Ultra Hand contraption.
Source: Before Mario
Pictured: Yokoi's "Wild Gunman" Laser Shooting Game (1974).
Abstractions aside, Yokoi was also recruiting a team of young, likeminded engineers that Yamauchi would openly pit against each other in an effort to stoke the fires of innovation. It was an unusually competitive environment for corporate Japan at the time, and one that would define the renowned modern-day Nintendo R&D teams.
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After the ‘love tester’, a chance encounter with a salesman from Sharp would be fortuitous for Nintendo and permanently cement a new direction – electronic games. Yokoi poached their smiling salesman, Masayuki Uemura, and utilized the new ‘Solar Cells’ to create laser shooting ranges that gave Japan’s dying bowling alleys a new purpose. It was the company’s first taste of the arcade world, and this time the orders were coming in from Europe and America too.
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With President Yamauchi ordering the construction of a new headquarters to capitalize on Yokoi’s arcade successes, Nintendo’s tech transition was well underway. Soon the old cement building that housed the hanafuda card production was being overshadowed by sparkling new siblings dedicated to games.
Meanwhile, Gunpei Yokoi was finding inspiration in the miniaturization of electronic calculators - or rather, a bored businessman pressing buttons on one - and the dirt cheap technology being used to make them. Small enough to fit in the hands of a child and developed using parts familiar to any digital watch fan, the Game & Watch was a masterclass in design efficiency, and the first major hit of Nintendo’s new R&D1 team headed by Yokoi. Each unit had only one game, few buttons, and basic LCD screens with fixed patterns to cut down on energy, memory use, and most importantly: cost.
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"The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply,” explains Yokoi, who would later go on to call this design philosophy: “Lateral Thinking With Withered Technology”.
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Although the sixty games released past 1980 were very basic, today’s consoles are still taking design cues from one of the Game & Watch's
most important innovations, and another Yokoi masterstroke: the cross-directional D-Pad. Born in the process of converting arcade smash-hit Donkey Kong into a budget hand-held, it was an elegant solution to an overcrowded button layout, and one soon to be borrowed for a top secret project. Not to mention, Donkey Kong itself was the work of a certain young designer and apprentice of Yokoi’s – the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto.
Source: Wikipedia Commons (Rogerdahl)
Post Game & Watch, Yokoi’s R&D1 and Masayuki Uemura’s R&D2 teams worked in secret for years to develop an entirely new home video game system that fit within the withered technology mantra. By the 1983 video game industry crash - while Atari were busy burying a certain game about an extra-terrestrial in a New Mexico landfill - development of the Nintendo Family Computer was reaching its final stages. With the sprinkling of a D-Pad on each controller, it was ready.
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And boy was it a hit.
Put it this way - the Famicom sold so many units that, despite being discontinued in 1995, Nintendo was actively repairing them until well into the 2000s.
Nintendo-mania was here,
and a wall of competition from Atari, MSX and Sega could do nothing to stop it.
With a young Miyamoto on-deck and plugging away at the character design for a red-capped plumber once called “Jump Man”, Yokoi quickly found his knack for tinkering with toys tapped again. President Yamauchi thought the Famicom needed a Trojan horse in time for its US launch as the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985; a flashy gadget that would bring the punters in and slaughter them with the potential of the NES while helping them forget about the industry crash of years past.
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Yokoi was the lead designer hiding within R.O.B. - the Robotic Operating Buddy - which harnesses the horsepower of four AA batteries as it whirs and whines its arms around through the two games designed for it – Gyromite and Stack-Up. While R.O.B.’s moves could be described as elegantly snail-like, every time a plastic gyro spins there’s a kind of simple design prowess on display that earnt Yokoi the title of nazonoyona - an enigma - amongst his R&D1 colleagues.
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R.O.B. might have been a gateway to the NES for some, but by and large it was Miyamoto’s Super Mario Bros. that launched it into the stratosphere with an 80% market share. “If you don’t know who Super Mario is you can’t understand what the talk at school is about,” one Japanese 6-year-old told newspapers at the time.
Source: Youtube User "Unbox Therapy"
Source: High-Def Digest
Now that everyone was playing with power, as the famous ad campaign would have you believe, Yokoi refocused on producing a little game of his own: the space platformer with a female protagonist - Metroid. Though he soon found himself gravitating back into the orbit of hand-held devices.
“Have you ever secretly dreamed that you could put your NES in your pocket so that you could play it wherever you go? So have we,” declared Nintendo Power in 1989.
In a pre-internet world, that little footnote in the May edition of Nintendo’s official propaganda publication was the public’s first look at Gunpei Yokoi’s career defining invention: the Game Boy.
A love child of the Game & Watch and the NES, the Game Boy brought together everything he had learnt as a designer with one simple ambition: NES-equivalent fun on the go. Produced by Yokoi and his “band of samurai” at R&D1, the US$90 Game Boy was the affordable 8-bit monochrome hand-held with a killer app bundled in its arsenal: Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris. From young kids to old businessmen, soon everyone wanted a piece of the jagged Tetris puzzle – and it was clear the competition had a problem.
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“After we released the Game Boy, one of my staff came to me with a grim expression on his face,” Yokoi recalls. Hot on their heels was a battery-devouring monster: the Sega Game Gear. “The technology was there to do colour, but I wanted us to do black and white anyway,” he explains. "If you draw two circles on a blackboard, and say ‘that’s a snowman’… everyone will intuitively recognize it’s a snowman. That’s because we live in a world of information, and when you see that drawing of the snowman, the mind knows this colour has to be white.”
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So Yokoi had one simple question for his colleague: colour or monochrome? “He told me it was colour, so I reassured him… ‘Then we’re fine’,” he laughs. Although Sega’s handheld was technically superior at twice the asking price, anyone that’s actually played a Sega Game Gear knows instinctively why his intuition payed off – yesterday’s colour LCDs were horrendous. Yokoi’s modus operandi of weathered over cutting-edge again managed to cement in a loyal audience, and elevate his own status within Nintendo to superstar.
With the Super Nintendo just around the corner in 1990 and on the back of the Game Boy’s astronomical success, Yokoi suddenly found himself at a career crossroads. In Game Pavilion, his autobiography co-written by friend Takefumi Makino, Yokoi describes feeling increasingly detached from the home console market as the focus shifted from gameplay to graphics. Catering too much to a hard-core audience of seasoned gamers, Yokoi writes, risked damaging Nintendo’s general appeal.
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The company was outgrowing him, and the inventor within was steadily losing creative control as management bureaucracy increased proportionally with every big hit. Approaching the age of 50, and with over 25 years at Nintendo, Yokoi began laying out plans to retire and found his own company… until a visit from Reflection Technologies.
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Well before Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, the early 1990s was a boom time for virtual reality. Featuring a bonanza of low polygon counts and glacial framerates, players could don cumbersome headsets and physically move around virtual worlds like those of Virtuality’s infamous Dactyl Nightmare – a shoot ‘em up with swooping pterodactyls. Nintendo and Sega began to flirt with the idea for a home audience.
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What Reflection Technologies presented to Yamauchi and Yokoi on that fateful day in 1991 was a budget version – the “Scanned Linear Array” display technology of their Private Eye gadget, in a primitive head tracking demo. Yokoi was fascinated because the mask immersed players in complete darkness and presented a ‘borderless’ image. In reality, magnifying lenses and a rapidly oscillating mirror combined the output of the two LED arrays, presenting a high resolution image to the eyes.
Pictured: Peering into the Virtual Boy viewport.
Overlooking the obvious drawback of a red-only display, a lateral-thinking lightbulb lit up in his mind: you could create depth by drawing a slightly different scene in each eye piece. "What should be done to once again engross Famicom and Super Famicom players?” Yokoi asks in his autobiography. “If the TV screen medium has reached the limits of its potential, isn’t 3D the only option?" Yamauchi agreed, and Yokoi’s band of samurai set to work on an ambitious wearable device that would blend elements of burgeoning VR with 3D: the Virtual Boy.
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Code-named VR32 within Nintendo amidst its obvious foundations, the actual reality became anything but as Yokoi was pressured into watering down key aspects of his virtual ambition. Head tracking was scrapped early on for cost, and plans of a strap-on or shoulder-mounted unit were scotched by Nintendo higher-ups over liability concerns - what would happen if a kid fell down a staircase while playing this thing? By 1993, the VR32 had become a bulky bipod-mounted visor contraption that sat fixed on a desk.
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With the Nintendo 64 on the horizon and eating up precious development resources, Yokoi’s project was further hamstrung by a distinct lack of interest from within the company, and mascot Mario was already tapped for a very different 3D debut. President Yamauchi, knowing just how much capital was invested already, told R&D1 to develop their own games and just finish the thing – quick smart. Early press clippings were abuzz with excitement at the initial idea, but by the time of the Virtual Boy’s Japanese premiere at the Shoshinkai Software Exhibition on November 15, 1994, it was a searing red husk of Yokoi’s original vision.
Pictured: An image from the US Patent for the Virtual Boy "Image Display Device".
Pictured: An actual print ad, vaguely reminiscent of how it feels to play a Virtual Boy.
Crowds were less than enthusiastic at the all-red visuals, no killer game, and the fact you couldn’t share the stereoscopic experience with your friends as you hunched over a table. Players complained of sore eyes and necks after short periods of play, and lamented the boring sprite-based graphics in an era saturated with detail and colour. Soon the writing was on the wall, and in the media.
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Sega of America executives were reportedly referring to it as the “dog of the year”, despite having their own problems with the upcoming Sega Saturn. Magazines were similarly unimpressed, with Next Generation writing: “Either Nintendo has gone completely mad, or it deems the future of video gaming to be crude, red, and likely to induce headaches”.
Source: Vintage Computing and Gaming
According to biographer Takefumi Makino, Yokoi began to feel hiri-hiri: a sensation akin to being cooked slowly over a frying pan. Even after years of unstoppable hits, he knew the Virtual Boy was on the verge of becoming a huge lemon. A bungled $20-million advertising campaign ended up being the cherry on-top of a toxic combination of design compromises, packaging draped in eye-sight warnings, a suitably tepid response from the public, and bad press.
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Repeated price drops after the July 1995 launch did little to reverse the course of flagging sales, and within months upcoming games were quietly withdrawn from release schedules. Yokoi was sidelined - shackled to his first ever failure in tiny booths at tradeshows as the Nintendo 64 wowed crowds and became the company’s primary focus. The Virtual Boy ultimately went down in a ball of fire-sale flames after only six months on the market in Japan, and nine in the US. With only 770,000 units sold from go to woe, Nintendo’s fourth console was officially their biggest failure, and no one felt it more than Yokoi.
Source: Vintage Computing and Gaming
Pictured: The Virtual Boy's entire US game library.
Source: Matthew Henzel
Previous successes didn’t matter in the wake of the disaster; his punishment was dealt in the form of a new middle management roll with no creative input or power – a ‘window seat’ in Japanese corporate culture. After a career spanning 31 years, disillusioned, Gunpei Yokoi left Nintendo on August 15, 1996 to found Koto Co. - though not before leaving the Game Boy Pocket behind as a farewell gift.
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President Hiroshi Yamauchi didn’t blame him for the Virtual Boy’s failure, though in a society where company executives often stay for life, one can assume Yokoi’s decision to depart was at least partially fuelled by guilt - but we’ll never know
for sure.
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A year on from leaving Nintendo, Yokoi and a Koto co-worker were driving down an expressway in Ishikawa Prefecture, north of Tokyo, when they were involved in a fender bender. Yokoi got out to inspect the damage and was struck by a passing car, killing the 56-year-old instantly. It was an abrupt, tragic end to the life of a brilliant thinker and tinkerer - but almost 20 years on, the flame of his legacy is far from extinguished. He created something great, and left it right there on your controller.
