![]() WonderSwanĪmid the failure of the Virtual Boy and the launch of the more successful Game Boy Pocket, Yokoi left Nintendo on 15 August 1996 after thirty-one years at the company. However, Nintendo pushed the Virtual Boy to market so that it could focus development resources on the Nintendo 64. According to David Sheff's book Game Over, Yokoi never actually intended for the console to be released in its present form. According to his Nintendo and Koto colleague Yoshihiro Taki, Yokoi had originally decided to retire at age 50 to do as he pleased but had simply delayed it. ![]() Nintendo has denied that the Virtual Boy's poor performance in the market was the reason for Yokoi's subsequent departure from the company, holding that his retirement was "absolutely coincidental" to the market performance of any Nintendo hardware. Another of his creations, the Virtual Boy, was a commercial failure. and the Game Boy, the latter of which became a worldwide success. Yokoi's Virtual Boy (1995)Īfter Mario Bros., Yokoi produced several R&D1 games, such as Kid Icarus and Metroid. Yokoi is best known for his contribution in the creation of the Game Boy. He proposed the multiplayer concept and convinced his co-worker to give Mario some superhuman abilities, such as the ability to jump unharmed from great heights. Īfter the worldwide success of Donkey Kong, Yokoi continued to work with Miyamoto on the next Mario game, Mario Bros. ![]() Yokoi explained many of the intricacies of game design to Miyamoto at the beginning of his career, and the project only came to be approved after Yokoi brought Miyamoto's game ideas to the president's attention. In 1981, Yamauchi appointed Yokoi to supervise Donkey Kong, an arcade game created by Shigeru Miyamoto. Yokoi then got the idea for a watch that doubled as a miniature video gaming pastime. While traveling on the Shinkansen, Yokoi supposedly saw a bored businessman playing with an LCD calculator by pressing the buttons. He worked on toys until the company decided to make video games in 1974, when he became one of its first game designers, only preceded by Genyo Takeda. The Ultra Hand was a huge success, and Yokoi was asked to work on other Nintendo toys, including the Ten Billion Barrel puzzle, a miniature remote-controlled vacuum cleaner called the Chiritory, a baseball-throwing machine called the Ultra Machine, and a " Love Tester". Yamauchi ordered Yokoi to develop it as a proper product for the Christmas rush. In 1966, Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo at the time, came to a hanafuda factory where Yokoi was working and took notice of a toy, an extending arm that Yokoi made for his own amusement during spare time while doing maintenance. He was first hired by Nintendo in 1965 to maintain the assembly-line machines used to manufacture its hanafuda cards. Yokoi graduated from Doshisha University with a degree in electronics. As a long-time Nintendo employee, he was best known as creator of the Game & Watch handheld system, inventor of the cross-shaped Control Pad, the original designer of the Game Boy, and producer of a few long-running and critically acclaimed video game franchises such as Metroid and Kid Icarus. Gunpei Yokoi ( 横井 軍平, Yokoi Gunpei, 10 September 1941 – 4 October 1997), sometimes transliterated as Gumpei Yokoi, was a Japanese video game designer.
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