videoludica. game culture 

On October 4, 1997, engineer Gunpei Yokoi died in a car accident. That day, the videogame world lost one true visionary.

The Beginnings

Born on September the 10th, 1941 in Kyoto, the cultural capital of Japan, Yokoi began working at Nintendo after graduating in Electronics with the private university of Doshit. Back then (1965), Nintendo's main business was the manufacturing of playing cards, like the popular Hanafuda series. In his spare time Yokoi liked to design and build toys and one of these, a kind of extensible arm, captured the imagination of the then CEO of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi, during a visit to the factory where Yokoi was working. Yamauchi, who wished to expand the firm's activities, asked Yokoi to perfect the toy so that it could be introduced on the market by Christmas.

Called Ultra Hand, the mechanical arm was a runaway success and Yokoi was moved to the R&D branch, where he designed many more products like the Ultra Scope, a small periscope, and the Love Tester. The Love Tester was a simple electrical resistance meter, but its working principle (to use it one would have to hold hands with the other person) gave an acceptable excuse for young lovers to hold hands - a taboo in Japanese culture. In much the same way the Ultra Scope allowed people to see around corners and, especially, above the walls surrounding Japanese houses.


The new era

With the growing importance of the videogame business, Nintendo, like many other companies, decided to enter the blossoming new market. Yamauchi asked Yokoi to come up with something new, and once again the inspiration came from the lifestyle of Japanese. Most Japanese are commuters: a great number of people spend a great deal of time aboard trains, monorails, and other public transportation means to go from home to work and back. Yokoi had noticed that some businessmen and accountants played with their pocket calculators to pass the time, and he thought of a portable electronic game that could be used in such a way, and still be small enough to carry around without taking too much space.

The result was the popular Game & Watch series, cheap and small-sized gaming consoles that could be easily pocketed. Portable consoles were already in existence (normally based around LED displays) but the Game & Watch console used a liquid crystal display that was enough, alone, to reduce the device's size. Many devices in the series could easily be contained in a jacket's pocket and the battery's life was increased because of the electronic components' reduced power requirements.

Game & Watch was a phenomenal success for Nintendo: the consoles were not only popular, but cheaply mass-produced. Yokoi, whose mantra was "gameplay first", had centered the whole design process on off-the-shelf, mature and reliable technology.

It was with Game & Watch that one of the innovations that tie Gunpei Yokoi's name to the videogaming world to this day was born. The consoles usually had two buttons for directions and one for action, but some games like Donkey Kong needed 4 directions. Using 4 separate buttons was a practical but not very elegant solution, so Yokoi designed a cross-shaped directional control with four switches: the D-Pad or directional cross was born. It was a controller system so simple and elegant that Yokoi didn't even feel the need to patent it.

The D-Pad is one of those things that, nowadays, gamers take for granted. And yet, the whole concept of controlling movement with the thumb alone was a revolution in a world made of joysticks, paddles, trackballs and Intellivision-style directional discs, like the early 1980's gaming scene had seen. The popular control system has stayed with us through five generations of consoles (NES, SNES, N64, GameCube and Wii) with no signs of aging.


The Game Boy

As general manager of R&D1, the first research & development group at Nintendo, Gunpei Yokoi played a leading role in the making of some of the greatest successes of the Japanese firm (Metroid, Kid Icarus among many) and was Shigeru Miyamoto's (Donkey Kong, Zelda, Super Mario) mentor.

But his greatest achievent as an inventor remains the wildly popular Game Boy. The programmable pocket console debuted 1989 (in its "fridge" configuration) and was a resounding success for Nintendo. A technical and commercial triumph that continues today. Portable consoles were not a novelty: Milton Bradley's Microvision and the Entex Adventurevision had been on the market for almost a decade. However, they encountered considerable less success because of their size (Adventurevision) or limited flexibility (Microvision). The Game Boy, with its NES-inspired configuration (D-Pad, two action buttons, two function buttons) and its immense software library, radically changed the way gamers played the games. Gaming had finally become a nomadic experience and, thanks to the Game Link cable, even acquired a new social component: it was feasible to bring one's games along and play with other people, and even swap in-game items or other things.

Sharing the same philosophy that had made the Game & Watch, the Game Boy was built with proven (its CPU was a Sharp version of the venerable Zilog Z80 that had powered many historical machines like the ZX Spectrum), cheap and efficient technology. It didn't have a color screen (that was introduced only 9 years later with the Game Boy Color) and its spartan architecture reduced power consumption, a factor that gave it an edge against its competitors the Atari Lynx, Sega Game Gear and SNK Neo Geo Pocket: the Game Boy could function for up to 35 hours on its cells, while its rivals averaged 4 to 6 hours.
The Game Boy is to this day the most successful portable console in history, with more than 118 millions of units sold (2005 stats). It's difficult to imagine the history of videogames without the "fridge" and its successors.


Virtual Boy

The first half of the Nineties is remembered by those in the field as the "VR craze" phase. VR viewers appeared on computer and videogame magazines' ads, movies like The Lawnmower Man starring Pierce Brosnan and Jeff Fahey contributed to raise public interest in the new technology.

Yokoi wanted to create a new type of gaming experience and the Virtual Boy was something new. 3D videogames had been in existance since a long time (the Milton Bradley Vectrex had a specialized viewer) but the new consoles was built on new concepts: instead of using colored lenses and slightly offset imagery, the VB used the parallax effect to generate 3D images.

In spite of its name the VB was not a VR machine: a true VR device is capable of changing the angle of view inside the playing field with the head (or even the eyes in advanced models) movements. The Virtual Boy was a 3D videogaming console, monochromatic because a 3D color imagery generator would have been too complex and expensive.

If the Game Boy had been the greatest success for Nintendo, the Virtual Boy was one of the great fiascos: the console was expensive, not ergonomic and the games were downright dated in the Playstation era. However, its development brought about a very ergonomical controller device able to work with a 3D game, a sharp contrast with the unwieldy visor.


After Nintendo

Gunpei Yokoi left Nintendo in 1996, one year after the launch of the Virtual Boy. It's still debated how much exactly the VB's lack of success had weighted on his decision to leave, but it's a fact that Yokoi kept working as an external consultant for Nintendo even after he had founded his own enterprise, Koto Laboratory, in his birthplace of Kyoto.

His first project was the Wonderswan, a portable console designed in cooperation with Bandai. It was also his very last because on October the 4th, 1997, Yokoi was killed in a car accident. One of the pioneers of the entertainment electronics industry, the man who made "Nintendo" synonymous with videogame through his inventions, and who had influenced whole generations of gamers had passed away; as of today, many of his ideas and concepts are part of our videogaming life.

It is necessary to celebrate him, a decade after his passing, as a pioneer and an innovator. And, above all, as a game creator.