Before Nintendo became Nintendo,
it was a card company that began in 1889 by producing traditional Japanese playing cards.
When long-time President Hiroshi Yamauchi took over the family business in the 1940s,
he tried to figure out a way to extend the company’s reach.
He secured a partnership with the Walt Disney Company to start
creating Western style playing cards with Disney characters.
However, by the 1960s, people were no longer interested in playing cards.
The Japanese gravitated toward other hobbies like arcade games or bowling.
In a desperate attempt to stay afloat, Nintendo sold everything.
Literally everything.
Including a toy vacuum cleaner.
Gunpei Yokoi joined Nintendo in 1965 when the company wasn’t at all involved in video games.
He studied electronics at university and watched his friends get plum engineering
jobs straight out of school while he struggled to land a job in his field.
He was adamant that he wouldn’t need to leave Kyoto to do it.
It just so happened that Nintendo’s headquarters were in Kyoto.
Nintendo was never his first choice or even second or third choice.
But out of desperation, he applied. Not even to work as an engineer, but as a maintenance staffer.
He was hired by Nintendo in 1965 to maintain
the assembly-line machines that manufactured the playing cards.
He found he had a lot of time on his hands and started playing around in
the factory where he had access to the machinery.
For his own amusement, he built an extendable arm toy that could grip things. Kinda like this.
That caught the attention of President Yamauchi, who called Yokoi into his office.
Yokoi thought he was going to get chewed out by the boss.
But instead, the president was impressed by his employee’s inventiveness.
He asked him to make a toy that the company could sell at Christmas.
According to the book “Game Over” by David Sheff, Yokoi asked the boss: ''What should I make?''
Yamauchi replied: “Something great”
He thought he could turn his extended arm into a great product.
The Ultra Hand was a simple plastic zig-zag contraption that extended and
contracted like an accordion when you squeezed the handles together.
It came with a set of three balls and stands which could be used for practice.
The Ultra Hand was a great success,
Nintendo’s first product ever to sell more than a million units.
President Yamauchi then asked Yokoi to work on more toys.
He designed the Ultra Machine which came out in 1967.
The ball shot out toward the player who tried to hit it.
It was a good idea to make a toy related to baseball
considering how popular the sport is in Japan.
This was Nintendo’s second product to sell over a million units.
Yokoi devised many more hits including the “Love Tester” which supposedly measured the
level of affection between a couple when they held hands and touched the device.
It was the first Nintendo product to run on electricity, though it was quite rudimentary.
The love test was yet another hit.
But not everything Nintendo sold was successful. One product nearly killed the company.
In 1973, Nintendo came out with the Laser Clay.
Yokoi had the idea of turning abandoned bowling alleys into
shooting galleries where people fire at clay pigeons with light-beam guns.
By then bowling was on the wane.
Although this was a clever idea, it was expensive and the timing was terrible.
The same year it came out, OPEC drastically raised
the price of crude oil and gasoline prices skyrocketed.
Nobody was in the mood to spend money on toys.
Nintendo plunged 5 billion yen in the red. (or $36 million US in today’s dollars)
It narrowly escaped…but it did…and then became even stronger.
The bright side was that laser clay paved the way for the beloved duck hunt,
the classic shooter video game released a decade later.
With the exception of Laser Clay, many of Nintendo’s early products were a hit
within Japan but didn’t reach any level of global success until…the release of Ten Billion in 1980.
You had to get the colored balls into their original
position after they were rotated by two drums.
This was Nintendo’s response to the Rubik’s cube.
For many people around the world,
Yokoi’s Ten Billion was the first time they had heard of Nintendo.
As the company grew bigger, its research and development division split into three units.
Yokoi was in charge of unit 1 which focused on small, hand-held games.
The story goes that Yokoi was sitting on a bullet train one day when he saw
a bored businessman fiddling around with his calculator. Yokoi realized
the appeal of portable games that anyone could play anywhere to pass the time.
But he had to convince his boss that this should be the company’s direction.
One day, when President Yamauchi’s chauffeur was off with the flu,
Yokoi drove the president to a meeting.
He took the opportunity to pitch his idea of creating a portable
gaming device but President Yamauchi didn’t seem all that interested.
However, as fate would have it, Yokoi dropped Yamauchi off at a meeting where he sat beside the
president of the world’s largest manufacturer of calculators, Sharp, and mentioned the idea to him.
Things took off from there, and Nintendo decided to give portable games a shot.
In 1980, Nintendo released Game and Watch.
Although Game and Watch would go through 60 different versions,
what remained the same was the distinct cross-shaped control pad.
This would later end up on Yokoi’s masterpiece, the Game Boy.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’re still a few years away from the Game Boy.
Things were looking promising for Nintendo in the early eighties.
However, starting in 1983, revenues for video game makers dropped almost 97% in two years!!
Home video game revenues peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983,
then fell to around $100 million by 1985.
The industry-wide decline was blamed on an oversaturated market,
especially in North America, where there were too many consoles to choose from.
President Yamauchi also attributed the crash to poorly designed games. He felt market leader Atari
gave too much power to third-party developers who produced “rubbish games”, in his words.
Atari’s E.T. is widely considered the worst video game of all time.
The video game industry also had to fend off competition from the rise of personal computers.
Store owners questioned whether video games
were just a passing fad that would eventually flame out.
Then, in 1985, Nintendo released the Family Computer - also known
as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).
President Yamauchi wanted a simple video game
console and that’s exactly what Nintendo’s offered.
It started running as soon as you turned it on,
and if there was a problem, all you had to do was press the reset button.
To avoid Atari’s mistake of poorly designed games,
Nintendo strictly controlled third-party development.
It introduced a lock-out chip so that any unauthorized games
would be “locked out”, they couldn’t be played.
The company also decided that approved video games would carry the official Nintendo seal.
Nintendo managed to win back the public’s trust and the gaming industry started to recover.
By 1989, Nintendo dominated the market, earning $2.5 billion in revenue a year,
and around 70% of North America’s video game market share,
largely thanks to the stunning success of Super Mario Bros.
Yokoi would personally mentor the game’s designer, Shigeru Miyamoto.
Yokoi convinced him to give Mario superhuman qualities,
like the ability to fall from any height unharmed.
Super Mario Bros helped Nintendo wipe out its competitors.
The mustachioed plumber with overalls and a
red cap was such a hit that Mario became Nintendo’s official mascot.
Instead of sitting pretty with the success of its console,
Nintendo reinvented itself again when Yokoi invented his greatest success.
The bulky grey brick won the hearts of the world upon its release in 1989.
When Yokoi started to design the Game Boy, he implemented a development philosophy called
“Lateral thinking with withered technology” which means innovative ideas can lead to new
products using pre-existing technology... as opposed to producing cutting-edge technology.
Yokoi’s goal was to build a product that was inexpensive enough to mass produce
so that it was affordable for consumers. And - it also had to be fun, of course.
Nintendo decided to use a monochrome LCD screen
instead of color because the battery life lasted longer,
and it was easier to see under direct sunlight which allowed people to enjoy playing outdoors.
It wasn’t perfect, though; the screen had a green tint and the characters were always very blurry.
Yokoi agonized over that small screen, and at one point,
was so stressed that he stopped eating and was diagnosed with acute malnutrition.
He recalled: "I considered it my biggest failure. At one point, I honestly contemplated suicide."
Yet what he considered his biggest failure turned out to be his greatest success.
What Yokoi didn’t realize then was that people are okay with imperfections.
Kids didn’t really care about the specs. They just wanted a fun, highly addictive portable game.
By the way, the big difference between the Game
Boy and Game & Watch is that Game & Watch could only play one game,
whereas you could swap out the cartridges on the Game Boy and play whatever game you wished.
The Game Boy sold a million units in the U.S. in just a few weeks
and would go on to sell nearly 120 million units in total worldwide.
So, when he left the company in 1996 to start his own gaming company, people were shocked.
Japanese executives tended to stay at one company for life, so some speculated that he was fired.
Also, the follow-up to the game boy - the virtual boy - was a commercial failure.
It was a video game console that used virtual reality technology
but it was a flop because it was costly and uncomfortable to wear.
Yokoi was 55 years old when he started Koto Laboratory,
which eventually released a handheld gaming console called WonderSwan in
partnership with Bandai (Band-dye) in order to compete with the Game Boy.
But Yokoi would never see WonderSwan hit the market. Because…tragedy struck.
On October 4, 1997, he was a passenger in a car that rear-ended a truck on an expressway about
200 miles northwest of Tokyo. When Yokoi and the driver, a business associate, got out to examine
the damage, another car struck them, killing Yokoi. His associate suffered a fractured rib.
Gunpei Yokoi was 56 years old.
His tombstone is inscribed with the dates of his top creations.
One reason Yokoi was so successful is that he had a deep understanding of what people desired.
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