Gunpei Yokoi

Gunpei Yokoi, also seen as Gumpei Yokoi (横井軍平 Yokoi Gunpei, first name means "plain army" in Japanese. Born in Kyoto, Japan, over his lifetime (September 10, 1941 - October 4, 1997) he became one of the most important figures in the history of the video game company Nintendo.

Nintendo

Toys

Nintendo, a company over 100 years old, has sold a number of different products ranging from a card game called Hanafuda in the late 1800s to video games in the present day. Yokoi began working at the company in 1965, after graduating college with a degree in electronics from Doshisha University and started out working on the assembly line for the Hanafuda cards.

In 1970, Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo at the time, came to Yokoi and asked him to develop something for the Christmas rush. Yokoi responded the next day, presenting the Ultra Hand, an expanding arm toy that Yokoi had designed for his own amusement. The Ultra Hand was a huge success, selling 1.2 million units. Yokoi would also develop many other toys during Nintendo's toy era, including the Ten Billion Barrel puzzle, a baseball throwing machine called the Ultra Machine and a Love Tester. Another invention of his, in collaboration with Masayuki Uemoura from Sharp, were the Nintendo Beam Gun Games, the precursor to the NES Zapper.

Game & Watch

Nintendo eventually began to sell video games, and Yamauchi asked Yokoi to come up with something once the change to video games was made. The 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.

The Game & Watch series saw 59 titles between 1980 and 1986. Many popular arcade games were translated into Game & Watch titles, including Donkey Kong and Super 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 fifty-five 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 like 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 Seisen no Keifu (scored by Yuka Tsujiyoko) along-side them.

R&D1 was also responsible for the Robotic Operating Buddy (R.O.B.) accessory for the Famicom.

The remaining members of R&D1 remained with Yokoi, and they began developing what would become 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 was a small, although bulky, handheld that 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 was all the portability of the Game & Watch titles but with the cartridge interchanging capabilities of the Famicom. During its Game & Watch days, Nintendo marketed the handhelds at an affordable price, yet keeping a standard of high quality, which transitioned into the Game Boy. This marketing technique has proven very effective for Nintendo, and has helped to beat many competitors.

One of the Game Boy's longest traditions has been 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 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. Indeed, Yokoi's standard of high quality saw the Game Boy, with a superior game library and long battery life, dominate the handheld market while the color screen Game Gear and Atari Lynx failed due to high battery consumption.

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 colorless; 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 Yokoi's standards (he had already died by then), the Game Boy Color required 2 AA (compared to 4 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. Due to its success, they were assigned to develop exclusively for the Game Boy. Some of them include the Super Mario Land series, Return of Samus, and the puzzler 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, his success was shadowed by a dark period 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 3-D, the red presented by the machine often irritated many gamers' 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 flopped 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 G4, 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, long after his death. The first game released for the WonderSwan was named "Gunpey" in his honor (not to be confused by the PSP game "Gunpey" which is also a tribute to Yokoi).

Death

On October 4, 1997, Yokoi was killed in a car accident. He was riding in a car driven by Etsuo Kisō, a businessman from Nintendo. Seeing a car accident, Kisō and Yokoi pulled over to examine the damage of two automobiles. While examining, two cars rammed into the broken down car from either side, crushing Yokoi. Yokoi was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead two hours later. Kisō endured two badly broken bones and severe whiplash.

(Information unconfirmed, following is an alternate version taken from http://www.virtual-boy.org/gunpei%20yokoi.htm)

Gunpei Yokoi, a 56-year-old native of Kyoto, Japan, was traveling with Etsuo Kisoo, an executive from Kyoto, on the Hokuriku Expressway in Neagarimachi, Ishikawa Prefecture, when Kisoo rear-ended the car in front of them. When the two stepped out of their car to survey the damage, both Yokoi and his associate were sideswiped by another car (driven by a Mr. Iwao Tsushima, whom and his wife received slight injuries). Yokoi sustained serious injuries and was immediately transported to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead two hours later. His associate was treated for a fractured rib.

Awards and Recognition

Yokoi posthomously received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony on March 6, 2003.
G4 ran an episode of Icons with the Game Boy as the topic. Much of the episode talks about Yokoi, his position prior to the Game Boy, and his death.

External links

About.com Guide to Game Boy - All things Game Boy: News, reviews, history, culture and development. Updated several times a week.
Gunpei Yokoi's Lifetime Achievement Award
Gunpei Yokoi
N-Sider Profile: Gunpei Yokoi
N-Sider: History of R&D 1
Gunpei Yokoi profile at MobyGames

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