On this day ten years ago, Gunpei Yokoi, one of the most important and influential figures in gaming, passed away. For those of you who do not know, Gunpei is the creator of the Game Boy, the system that revolutionized portable gaming, and paved the way for every handheld system to follow.
Game Boy is not the first thing that Mr. Yokoi created. One day, he was riding home on a bullet train from his job at Nintendo. He noticed that the man seated next to him on the train was messing around with an LCD calculator. This event gave birth to Game & Watch, a series of stand alone LCD games. The Game & Watch was very influential on Nintendo's future, especially in modern times. In fact, for Nintendo DS, they pretty much took a two screen Game & Watch game (such as Mario Bros. or Donkey Kong), added modern LCD screens, and turned the bottom part into a touch screen. Also, if you ever play Super Smash Bros. Melee on GameCube, you'll notice that one of the characters you can play as is Mr. Game & Watch, who was the protagonist of many of the Game & Watch games, such as Ball.
After creating Game & Watch, Nintendo appointed him to the head of Nintendo R&D1. While heading up R&D1, he was instrumental in the creation of Kid Icarus, Metroid, and of course R.O.B. for the NES. However, R&D1's most famous creation was to come...
In 1989, Gunpei and his R&D1 team revolutionized the portable gaming market with the original Game Boy, which combined the cartridge based gaming of the NES with the portability of Game & Watch. The Game Boy inspired many of Nintendo's competitors to enter the handheld gaming ring: Sega with the Game Gear, and Atari with the Lynx. While both of them were technically superior and featured a color screen, each of them completely failed in comparison to the Game Boy, due to its very long battery life, small size, and excellent game selection. These factors caused Game Boy held onto the gaming market with an iron grip for 13 years through many variations and revisions, including a color version.
Gunpei's most ambitious project, Virtual Boy, was released in 1995. Virtual Boy was an attempt to create a "portable" system capable of displaying true 3D graphics. However, this system went down as one of the biggest failures in gaming history. Some of the reasons it failed were because it was only able to display red, caused eye strain in most users, ate up 6 AA batteries rather quickly, was not very portable, was fragile, and it cost $180 at launch. The system was discontinued a year later.
The failure of Virtual Boy really brought Gunpei down. He felt horrible, and Nintendo placed the blame on the Virtual Boy failure on him. This pressure led to his resignation from Nintendo on August 15, 1996, mere days after Game Boy Pocket game out in Japan.
After leaving Nintendo, he went to form his own company, Koto Laboratories. They started working on the Wonderswan for Bandai, however, Gunpei would never see the final product...
On October 4, 1997, Gunpei was riding in a car driven by Etsuo Kiso from Nintendo. Kiso's car accidentally rear-ended a truck driving in front of them the Hokuriku Expressway. Gunpei and Kiso got out of the car to examine the situation. While surveying the damage, another vehicle collided with the Kiso's car, killing Gunpei Yokoi.
Fast forward ten years, we can still find Yokoi's legacy still alive. Be it in Nintendo DS's Game & Watch inspired design, the continuation of Metroid, Mr. Game & Watch's appearance in Super Smash Bros, or in the game Gunpey for Wonderswan, PSP, and Nintendo DS. Gunpei Yokoi is an undisputed legend in the industry, and he is missed by all of us.
Check out this article from
The Escapist for even more information.
