Gunpei Yokoi

Gunpei Yokoi (Japanese: 横井 軍平; sometimes transliterated Gumpei Yokoi) (Kyoto, September 10, 1941-Ishikawa Prefecture, October 4, 1997 listen)) was a Japanese video game developer who worked for Nintendo. Possessing great inventiveness and creativity, he invented the famous Game Boy portable console and the Game & amp; Watch, very popular at that time, considered to be the prototype of the first mentioned. He was also the man who developed the Metroid and Kid Icarus series.

Nintendo

Biography

Gunpei Yokoi began working at Nintendo in 1965, after graduating with a degree in Electronics from Doshisha University. Yokoi began working on the assembly line for hanafuda cards (a Nintendo product) as a maintenance engineer.

In 1966 the president of Nintendo at the time, Hiroshi Yamauchi, came to the factory where Yokoi was working and came to see a toy, a kind of extendable arm, that Yokoi had made to entertain himself in his spare time as a maintenance man. Yamauchi ordered Yokoi to develop the toy as a Christmas shopping-oriented product. The “Ultra Mano” was a huge success, selling approximately 1.2 million units. Thanks to this, Yokoi was transferred from maintenance to the product development sector. Yokoi went on to develop many other products for Nintendo around the time the company was making toys, including a remote-controlled miniature vacuum cleaner called the “Chiritory”; a machine throws baseballs, called the "Ultra Machine" and a "love test". Another of his inventions, in collaboration with Sharp's Masayuki Uemura, was the Nintendo Beam Cannon, the precursor to the NES Zapper.

In 1980 Gunpei Yokoi created two mechanical brain toys ("puzzles") that once again confirmed his creative and abstract intelligence. It is the "Ten Billion Barrell" (テンビリオン) and Trillion (which in the United States marketed "Ideal Toys"), both covered in US patent US4376537 from 1980. In 1982, Yokoi granted Nintendo a patent for another mind game called "Crossover" (patent US4402510). In 2007, the Ten Billion Barrell was reissued in the shape of a star as a special edition for members of the Japanese Club Nintendo.

Game & Watch

Game & Watch, Yokoi's first work

When Nintendo eventually started selling video games, Yamauchi asked Yokoi if he could develop a product in this field. After seeing a bored businessman playing with a calculator on a bullet train, Yokoi invented a prototype. The initial result was the popular Game & Watch. Game & Watch were individual consoles that included an LCD screen. Some consider these consoles to be a prototype of the Game Boy, a portable that would be released later, proving to be Yokoi's greatest work. These games featured a "pad-pad," known to many video game fans today as a D-pad, a controller consisting of four buttons grouped in a + (pad) shape that correspond to the directions "up", "down", "left" and "right". In most games, the D-Pad is used to control the direction of certain objects and the characters in question.

The Game & The Watch saw 59 titles between 1980 and 1991. Many popular arcade games were translated into titles for this console, including Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., games that Yokoi helped create with Shigeru Miyamoto. Many of these games were put into compilations for the Game Boy console, and later for the Nintendo DS.

Research and Development 1 (R&D1)

With the rise of the video game industry in the late 1970s, Nintendo began assigning its chief engineers to run its own divisions. Yokoi was chosen as the general manager of the “Research and Development 1” group (Research and Development 1, R&D1). R&D1 was made up of 55 designers, programmers and engineers. It was with this group that Yokoi developed new ideas for Nintendo at the time it was making its foray into the video game industry. Before Shigeru Miyamoto had his own R&D department in 1984, Gunpei Yokoi helped develop several of his famous arcade games, such as Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and the original Mario Bros. In 1985, Yokoi and his R&D1 department They created Kid Icarus, as well as the first title of one of Nintendo's most successful series: Metroid. Then in 1986, a part of Yokoi's R&D1 group defected, thus forming the company Intelligent Systems. Yokoi later produced the games Battle Clash, Panel de Pon, and Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu working alongside him. Yokoi was also responsible for recruiting the man who would design the Famicom/NES and Super Famicom/SNES: Masayuki Uemura. R&D1 also created R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy), a robot accessory for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The remaining members of the R&D1 group remained working with Yokoi and began developing what would become one of Nintendo's most lucrative products: the Game Boy.

Game Boy

The original Game Boy was Gunpei Yokoi's most important work.

Perhaps Yokoi's most notable work in hardware was the Game Boy handheld console, released in 1989. The Game Boy appeared to be the successor to the Game & Watch. However, numerous titles could be played on the Game Boy via a cartridge-based system, and the games were presented on a monochrome screen. In short, the console had the portability of the Game & Watch and the ability to swap cartridges from the Famicom.

One of the sales strategies for the Game Boy was to give the customer an affordable product with decent battery consumption. Even when Yokoi's superiors wanted a color version of the Game Boy (because competitors like the Game Gear, TurboExpress, and Atari Lynx were color handhelds), Yokoi refused to release a color version until technology allowed a color handheld console to be created. that could last a sufficient period with few batteries. Yokoi's persistence endowed the Game Boy with a huge catalog of titles and longer battery life, leading it to dominate the market, while the competition fell due to high battery consumption, few titles and high cost.

Finally, in 1998 the Game Boy Color, a color version of the Game Boy, was released. Staying true to the standards proposed by Yokoi, the console used two AA batteries (compared to the 4 used by the original GB) and had approximately the same level of consumption.

The Yokoi team was assigned to work exclusively on projects for the Game Boy. Some of the titles the team developed were the Super Mario Land series, Metroid II: Return of Samus, and the puzzle game Dr. Mario.

Virtual Boy

Virtual Boy, Yokoi's work.

Thanks to the success of the Game Boy and previous work, Gunpei Yokoi had become one of Nintendo's most respected members. However, much of his reputation fell dramatically with the development of the Virtual Boy, a home console that featured games in red and black. The Virtual Boy featured 3D images; however, the red hue presented by the machine irritated the users' eyes and the machine itself was extremely uncomfortable to use. The Virtual Boy came to own a total of 22 games. As a result, it was not successful in either Japan or North America, and was therefore never released in Europe. Yokoi was devastated due to the failure of the Virtual Boy, and his failure with this product caused many Nintendo employees to question his potential and his abilities. According to an episode of "Icons" on the G4 TV channel, Yokoi was treated in an exclusive way, like a reject, before submitting his resignation from Nintendo on August 15, 1996, just days after the Game Boy Pocket was released to the market.

After Nintendo

Koto Laboratories

Shortly after leaving Nintendo, Yokoi started his own company, Koto Laboratories, in Kyoto. There he began developing the WonderSwan console, a portable console developed in partnership between Koto Laboratories and Bandai. Yokoi never saw the final result of the WonderSwan, which was released in 1999, two years after his death.

Death

On October 4, 1997, at age 56, Yokoi was riding in a car driven by Etsuo Kiso, a Nintendo businessman. After a car accident in which they had collided with a truck on the Neagarimachi Expressway, Yokoi broke several ribs and Kiso suffered two fractures and severe whiplash. Yokoi, despite his injuries, got out of the car to help the others affected, but was hit by a third car. Two hours later, he was pronounced dead at the hospital, his latest personal project never seeing the light of day.

Games

Designer

• 1980 - Game & Watch
• 1985 - R.O.B.
• 1985 - Zapper
• 1989 - Game Boy
• 1995 - Virtual Boy
• 1999 - WonderSwan

Producer

• 1986 - Metroid
• 1991 - Metroid II: Return of Samus
• 1994 - Super Metroid
• 1986 - Kid Icarus
• 1988 - Famicom Tantei Club: Kieta Kōkeisha
• 1989 - Famicom Tantei Club Part II: Ushiro and Tatsu Shōjo
• 1989 - Super Mario Land
• 1990 - Fire Emblem: Ankoku Ryū to Hikari no Tsurugi
• 1992 - Fire Emblem Gaiden
• 1992 - Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
• 1994 - Fire Emblem: Monshō no Nazo
• 1996 - Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu
• 1990 - Dr. Mario
• 1992 - Yoshi's Cookie
• 1995 - Pon Panel (Loved in America as Tetris Attack)
• 1995 - Kirby's Block Ball