How a Factory Worker Saved Nintendo from Shutting Down

Before Nintendo became Nintendo, it was a playing card company that began in 1889 producing traditional Japanese playing cards. When President Hiroshi Yamauchi took over the family business in the 1940s, he tried to find a way to expand the company's reach. He partnered with the Walt Disney Company to begin creating Western-style playing cards featuring Disney characters. However, by the 1960s, people were no longer interested in playing cards. The Japanese gravitated toward other pastimes such as 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 was not involved in video games at all.

He studied electronics in college and watched his friends get great engineering jobs right out of school, while he struggled to get a job in his field. He was adamant that he would not need to leave Kyoto to do so. He just so happened that Nintendo's headquarters were in Kyoto. Nintendo was never his first choice, or even his second or third choice. But, in desperation, he applied for it. He not even to work as an engineer, but as a maintenance employee. Nintendo hired him in 1965 to maintain the assembly line machines that made the playing cards. He discovered that he had a lot of free time and started playing in the

factory

where he had access to the machinery.

For his own amusement, he built a toy with an extendable arm that could grab things. Something like that. That caught the attention of President Yamauchi, who called Yokoi to his office. Yokoi thought the boss was going to scold him. But instead, the president was impressed by the inventiveness of his employee. He asked her 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 do?" Yamauchi replied, "Something great." He thought he could turn his outstretched arm into a great product. The Ultra Hand was a simple zigzag plastic contraption that extended and contracted like an accordion when you squeezed the handles.

It came with a set of three balls and stands that could be used for practice. Ultra Hand was a huge success, the first Nintendo product to sell more than a million units. President Yamauchi then asked Yokoi to work on more toys. He designed the Ultra Machine, which appeared in 1967. The ball would shoot towards the player who tried to hit it. It was a good idea to make a baseball-related toy considering how popular the sport is in Japan. This was the second Nintendo product to sell more than one million units. Yokoi came up with 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, although it was quite rudimentary. The test of love was another success. But not everything Nintendo sold was successful. One product almost killed the company. In 1973, Nintendo released Laser Clay. Yokoi had the idea of ​​converting abandoned bowling alleys into shooting galleries where people shot pigeons with light guns. By then, bowling was in decline. Although it was a smart idea, it was expensive and the timing was terrible. The same year it came out, OPEC dramatically raised the price of crude oil and gasoline prices skyrocketed. Nobody was in the mood to spend money on toys.

Nintendo fell 5 billion yen into the red. (or $36 million in today's dollars) He narrowly escaped... but he did it... and then he got even stronger. The silver lining 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 hits in Japan, but didn't reach any level of global success until... the release of Ten Billion in 1980. The colored balls had to be placed into position. original after they were rotated by two drums. This was Nintendo's answer to the Rubik's Cube.

For many people around the world, Yokoi's Ten Billion was the first time they heard of Nintendo. As the company grew, its research and development division was divided into three units. Yokoi was in charge of unit 1, which focused on small portable games. The story goes that Yokoi was sitting on a bullet train one day when he saw a bored businessman fiddling 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 that should be the direction of the company. One day, when President Yamauchi's driver was sick with the flu, Yokoi took the president to a meeting.

He took the opportunity to present his idea of ​​creating a portable gaming device, but President Yamauchi didn't seem very interested. However, as fate would have it, Yokoi left Yamauchi at a meeting where he sat next to the president of the world's largest calculator manufacturer, Sharp, and mentioned the idea to him. Things took off from there and Nintendo decided to give handheld gaming a try. In 1980, Nintendo released Game and Watch. Although Game and Watch would go through 60 different versions, what remained the same was the distinctive cross-shaped control panel. It would later end up in 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 looked promising for Nintendo in the early 1980s. However, starting in 1983, video game makers' revenues fell almost 97% in two years. Domestic video game revenues peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983, then fell to around $100 million in 1985. The industry-wide decline was attributed to an oversaturated market, especially in North America, where there were too many consoles to choose from. President Yamauchi also attributed the accident to poorly designed games. He felt that market leader Atari gave too much power to third-party developers who produced "trash games," in his words.

The E.T. by Atari It 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 wondered if video games were just a fad that would eventually disappear. 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 offered. It started working as soon as you turned it on and if there was any 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. He introduced a blocking chip so that any unauthorized games would be "locked", unplayable. The company also decided that approved video games would carry the official Nintendo seal. Nintendo managed to regain the public's trust and the gaming industry began to recover. By 1989, Nintendo dominated the market, earning $2.5 billion in revenue annually and around 70% of the North American video game market share, largely thanks to the surprising success of Super Mario Bros. Yokoi would personally be the mentor of the game's designer, Shigeru Miyamoto. Yokoi convinced him to give Mario superhuman qualities, such as the ability to fall unharmed from any height.

Super Mario Bros helped Nintendo eliminate its competitors. The mustachioed plumber in overalls and a red cap was so successful that Mario became Nintendo's official mascot. Instead of being content with the success of its console, Nintendo reinvented itself again when Yokoi invented its biggest hit. The bulky gray brick won the hearts of the world upon its release in 1989. When Yokoi began designing the Game Boy, he implemented a development philosophy called "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology," which means that innovative ideas can lead to new products using pre-existing technology... instead of producing cutting-edge technology. Yokoi's goal was to create a product that was inexpensive enough to be mass produced and affordable to consumers.

And, of course, it had to be fun too. Nintendo decided to use a monochrome LCD screen instead of color because it had longer battery life and was easier to see in direct sunlight, allowing people to enjoy playing outdoors. However, it wasn't perfect; the screen had a green tint and the characters were always very blurry. Yokoi was dying in front of that small screen and, at one point, he 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." However, what he considered his greatest failure turned out to be his greatest success.

What Yokoi didn't realize then was that people like imperfections. The kids didn't really care about the specs. They just wanted a fun and highly addictive portable game. By the way, the big difference between the Game Boy and the Game & Watch is that the Game & Watch could only play one game, while on the Game Boy you could change cartridges and play whatever game you wanted. The Game Boy sold one million units in the United States in just a few weeks and would go on to sell almost 120 million units in total worldwide. So when he left the company in 1996 to start his own gaming company, people were surprised.

Japanese executives tended to stay with a company for life, so some speculated that he was fired. Furthermore, 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 failure because it was expensive and uncomfortable to use. Yokoi was 55 years old when he founded Koto Laboratory, which eventually released a handheld game console called WonderSwan in partnership with Bandai (Band-dye) to compete with the Game Boy. But Yokoi would never see WonderSwan hit the market. Because…tragedy happened. On October 4, 1997, he was a passenger in a car that rear-ended a truck on a highway about 200 miles northwest of Tokyo.

When Yokoi and the driver, a business partner, got out to examine the damage, another car hit them, killing Yokoi. His partner suffered a broken rib. Gunpei Yokoi was 56 years old. His tombstone is inscribed with the dates of his major creations.