Had Gunpei Yokoi not been killed in a traffic accident, yesterday would have been the Game Boy creator's 69th birthday.  There have been misconceptions regarding the inventor's departure from Nintendo, so to commemorate his birthday, we're setting the record straight.

Matt's Note: I couldn't find the original article on the net as I was hoping I would, so I'm translating an article that paraphrases it. We're still trying to track down the original article, which was published in the Nov. 1996 issue of Bungeishunjuu.

The day before Gunpei Yokoi resigned from Nintendo, Nikkei Newspaper ran a report stating that he was resigning to atone for his failure with the Virtual Boy. However, that failure had nothing to do with his resignation (see quotations at the end of the article). According to Mr. Yokoi, after this was reported, requests from reporters and newspapers came flooding in.

Due to that report, many people were under the impression that Mr. Yokoi "bore resentment to the absolute nature with which Mr. Yamauchi ruled the company." However, Mr. Yokoi actually felt the opposite—he felt that it was Yamauchi-san's total control that lead to the growth of the company.

There are many who hold a negative opinion in relation to the thought of one person having total control in a company; however, business isn't that simple. Furthermore, there is no one best way to run a company.

One of the strengths of Mr. Yamauchi is that he has always been especially gifted at sniffing out which products were destined to be a success. For instance, he was instrumental in the introduction of the product that would change the destiny of Nintendo: the Game and Watch.

The product, which only came about because of Mr. Yamauchi's dictatorial attitudes, sold 50 million units. When Mr. Yokoi was 38 years old, he proposed the product to Yamauchi. The president immediately expressed interest in the product saying, "make it happen,", so development began.

However, the consensus within the company was lukewarm. Over half of the people in sales and marketing had the opinion that "something like this can't sell."  If this was any normal company, during the proposal process the sales and marketing teams would have expressed their displeasure, and after several meetings, the product would have most definitely been canned. But because the head of the company wanted it to happen, no one dared oppose. After going ahead with production as he had wanted, Game and Watch was finished and became a smash hit.

In one fell swoop, the company now was able to pay off their over 8 billion yen debt and ended up with around 4 billion left over. Nintendo put the rest of the leftover money into the development of the Famicom. Even Mr. Yokoi was said to have had the opinion that "it doesn't really have to happen." And yet, the Famicom was a huge hit. And it can be said that the Game Boy and succeeding products were born of the same situation.

Mr. Yokoi was hired into Nintendo in 1965. Although he graduated with the same degree in Electrical Transmission Engineering as his other colleagues, his grades were closer to the bottom than the top. He had not even been able to find a job after graduating.

And then one day he came upon an advertisement for a position in Electrical Transmission Engineering at Nintendo. Nintendo was in need of an engineer to handle the over 30 kVA electrical receivers that were new tech at the time. That equipment was situated in the plant, where the machines were located that were required for maintenance of the hanafuda and game card producers.

Yet, management of electrical machinery was boring for Mr. Yokoi, so he would use the machines and circuit boards at his disposal to make toys and play with them. One time the head of the company saw his toys and said, "you—bring that toy and come to my office". Mr. Yokoi thought he was in trouble; however, it turns out that Mr. Yamauchi wanted to make that toy into a product and produce it. Mr. Yokoi hadn't even been in the company a year and had no experience with production of toys, and yet he somehow learned the modeling design techniques required to put the products together.

That first product was called the "Ultra Hand." During the Tokyo Olympics, the name "Ultra C" had become a popular term, and so the head of the company came up with the name with that in mind. [Ed. - "Ultra C" referred to an extremely difficult gymnastics maneuver that helped propel gymnast Yukio Endo to multiple gold and silver medals in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and was punctuated by NHK announcer Bunya Suzuki's shout of "Ultra!" whenever it was performed. It referred to the fact that the difficulty exceeded the "C" score, which was the maximum score given.]

The Ultra Hand was a huge hit, with 1.4 million units sold. At that time, if a toy sold 100,000 units it was considered a huge success. And so the head of the company created a development division specifically for Mr. Yokoi. It was originally just two people: Mr. Yokoi and Mr. Imanishi (currently head of marketing), who was added on to handle accounting. With that, the two-man development division created various toys such as the "Ultra Machine" and the light gun, changing the future of the game card-making company known as Nintendo.

At this time, Nintendo was more or less organized, but it wasn't such a strict organization. Mr. Yokoi was more or less considered a direct underling to the head of the company. Organizationally, development was one part of the manufacturing department, and in between the head of the company and Mr. Yokoi was the head of the manufacturing department. In reality, the head of the company would talk directly to Mr. Yokoi about development, and Mr. Yokoi rarely ever talked about development with his direct superior. So the de facto structure was really one that consisted of the head of the company being the head of the development department, with development actually being separate from manufacturing.

Furthermore, Mr. Yokoi's opinions were valued more by Yamauchi himself than by other board members, so he was more or less in a "number two" type of position. Mr. Yokoi wasn't the only one holding this impression; everyone else in the company felt the same.

It is said that this was the most enjoyable period for Mr. Yokoi during his tenure with the company.

In fact, he was even scouted by various other industries. He was promised huge bonuses and the like; however, whenever he listened to what the job would be like, he always felt that in the end, staying at Nintendo would be better, and he never changed his mind.

Yet, Nintendo is a listed company. Once its profit exploded it had a responsibility to its shareholders to continue raising its profit levels. Once this was the case, one success is simply not enough. Mr. Yokoi began to feel his sense of self-worth dropping.

In other words, Mr. Yokoi wanted to continue his life forever coming up with new ideas and making new toys with them. He wanted to continue tossing around ideas based on Nintendo's original policy of making cheap toys. However, as profits increased this became less and less possible. This was the only reason Mr. Yokoi left Nintendo.

Mass media insists on blaming it on some huge fight and subsequent breakup he had with Mr. Yamauchi. But for Mr. Yokoi, Nintendo was one of the parents that raised him, and its development ethic was his home.

Nintendo's PR concerning Mr. Yokoi's leave:

"It is reality that Mr. Yokoi has indeed left, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the failure of the Virtual Boy. There's no doubt that the Virtual Boy was a failure, but the head of the company himself has said that the blame for that rests on the decision to sell it to begin with. The D-pad and Game Boy that Mr. Yokoi developed are incredible. Such a man taking the blame for the 32-bit device and leaving the company is completely made up."

Additionally, Mr. Uemura, the head of Development Division 2 had this to say of the Famicom:

"Yeah, I had doubts. Actually, I was completely doubtful. Doubting that this thing could possibly sell... Even with my complete convictions as such, I knew that the only evaluation that mattered was that of the users. However, that was my feeling, and whether or not it would sell would be totally on the head of the company, who made the final decision."

Mr. Yamauchi makes it clear that the president has chosen to take responsibility for what makes or breaks the company from quite a way back:

"Once I've decided on something, I decide to go all the way - never faltering. That's because such is the responsibility of a businessman. Regardless of what happens to the company, the final responsibility is on me, and so it would be totally disregarding my responsibilities to run a business without my complete comprehension. If there's anyone that runs their business like that, they clearly aren't fit to do so."