Games - Gunpei Yokoi

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	Games - Gunpei Yokoi

Gunpei Yokoi, also seen as Gumpei Yokoi (横井軍平 Yokoi Gunpei, September 10, 1941 - October 4, 1997) was one of the most important figures in the history of the video game company Nintendo. Born in Kyoto, Japan, he was the producer of the Metroid and Kid Icarus video game franchises, as well as a driving force behind the development of the Game Boy and other pivotal Nintendo technologies.

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 Hanafunda 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 about the size of a credit card, and 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 Super 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, Tetris Attack (scored by Masaya Kuzume), and Fire Emblem: 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 greatest work 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 out many competitors.

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