0: Before Nintendo became Nintendo,

2: it was a card company that began in 1889 by producing traditional Japanese playing cards.

7: When long-time President Hiroshi Yamauchi took over the family business in the 1940s,

12: he tried to figure out a way to extend the company's reach.

15: He secured a partnership with the Walt Disney Company to start

19: creating Western style playing cards with Disney characters.

22: However, by the 1960s, people were no longer interested in playing cards.

26: The Japanese gravitated toward other hobbies like arcade games or bowling.

31: In a desperate attempt to stay afloat, Nintendo sold everything.

37: Literally everything.

39: Including a toy vacuum cleaner.

41: Gunpei Yokoi joined Nintendo in 1965 when the company wasn't at all involved in video games.

48: He studied electronics at university and watched his friends get plum engineering

52: jobs straight out of school while he struggled to land a job in his field.

56: He was adamant that he wouldn't need to leave Kyoto to do it.

59: It just so happened that Nintendo's headquarters were in Kyoto.

64: Nintendo was never his first choice or even second or third choice.

67: But out of desperation, he applied. Not even to work as an engineer, but as a maintenance staffer.

73: He was hired by Nintendo in 1965 to maintain

77: the assembly-line machines that manufactured the playing cards.

79: He found he had a lot of time on his hands and started playing around in

83: the factory where he had access to the machinery.

85: For his own amusement, he built an extendable arm toy that could grip things. Kinda like this.

91: That caught the attention of President Yamauchi, who called Yokoi into his office.

95: Yokoi thought he was going to get chewed out by the boss.

99: But instead, the president was impressed by his employee's inventiveness.

102: He asked him to make a toy that the company could sell at Christmas.

106: According to the book “Game Over” by David Sheff, Yokoi asked the boss: ''What should I make?''

112: Yamauchi replied: “Something great”

115: He thought he could turn his extended arm into a great product.

119: The Ultra Hand was a simple plastic zig-zag contraption that extended and

123: contracted like an accordion when you squeezed the handles together.

126: It came with a set of three balls and stands which could be used for practice.

130: The Ultra Hand was a great success,

132: Nintendo's first product ever to sell more than a million units.

137: President Yamauchi then asked Yokoi to work on more toys.

140: He designed the Ultra Machine which came out in 1967.

144: The ball shot out toward the player who tried to hit it.

147: It was a good idea to make a toy related to baseball

150: considering how popular the sport is in Japan.

152: This was Nintendo's second product to sell over a million units.

157: Yokoi devised many more hits including the “Love Tester” which supposedly measured the

162: level of affection between a couple when they held hands and touched the device.

166: It was the first Nintendo product to run on electricity, though it was quite rudimentary.

171: The love test was yet another hit.

174: But not everything Nintendo sold was successful. One product nearly killed the company.

180: In 1973, Nintendo came out with the Laser Clay.

184: Yokoi had the idea of turning abandoned bowling alleys into

187: shooting galleries where people fire at clay pigeons with light-beam guns.

192: By then bowling was on the wane.

194: Although this was a clever idea, it was expensive and the timing was terrible.

199: The same year it came out, OPEC drastically raised

202: the price of crude oil and gasoline prices skyrocketed.

206: Nobody was in the mood to spend money on toys.

209: Nintendo plunged 5 billion yen in the red. (or $36 million US in today's dollars)

212: It narrowly escaped…but it did…and then became even stronger.

218: The bright side was that laser clay paved the way for the beloved duck hunt,

223: the classic shooter video game released a decade later.

227: With the exception of Laser Clay, many of Nintendo's early products were a hit

232: within Japan but didn't reach any level of global success until…the release of Ten Billion in 1980.

239: You had to get the colored balls into their original

241: position after they were rotated by two drums.

244: This was Nintendo's response to the Rubik's cube.

247: For many people around the world,

249: Yokoi's Ten Billion was the first time they had heard of Nintendo.

253: As the company grew bigger, its research and development division split into three units.

258: Yokoi was in charge of unit 1 which focused on small, hand-held games.

262: The story goes that Yokoi was sitting on a bullet train one day when he saw

266: a bored businessman fiddling around with his calculator. Yokoi realized

271: the appeal of portable games that anyone could play anywhere to pass the time.

276: But he had to convince his boss that this should be the company's direction.

279: One day, when President Yamauchi's chauffeur was off with the flu,

283: Yokoi drove the president to a meeting.

286: He took the opportunity to pitch his idea of creating a portable

289: gaming device but President Yamauchi didn't seem all that interested.

293: However, as fate would have it, Yokoi dropped Yamauchi off at a meeting where he sat beside the

299: president of the world's largest manufacturer of calculators, Sharp, and mentioned the idea to him.

304: Things took off from there, and Nintendo decided to give portable games a shot.

308: In 1980, Nintendo released Game and Watch.

312: Although Game and Watch would go through 60 different versions,

315: what remained the same was the distinct cross-shaped control pad.

319: This would later end up on Yokoi's masterpiece, the Game Boy.

324: But I'm getting ahead of myself. We're still a few years away from the Game Boy.

328: Things were looking promising for Nintendo in the early eighties.

331: However, starting in 1983, revenues for video game makers dropped almost 97% in two years!!

339: Home video game revenues peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983,

343: then fell to around $100 million by 1985.

347: The industry-wide decline was blamed on an oversaturated market,

351: especially in North America, where there were too many consoles to choose from.

355: President Yamauchi also attributed the crash to poorly designed games. He felt market leader Atari

362: gave too much power to third-party developers who produced “rubbish games”, in his words.

367: Atari's E.T. is widely considered the worst video game of all time.

372: The video game industry also had to fend off competition from the rise of personal computers.

377: Store owners questioned whether video games

380: were just a passing fad that would eventually flame out.

385: Then, in 1985, Nintendo released the Family Computer - also known

390: as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

393: President Yamauchi wanted a simple video game

396: console and that's exactly what Nintendo's offered.

399: It started running as soon as you turned it on,

401: and if there was a problem, all you had to do was press the reset button.

404: To avoid Atari's mistake of poorly designed games,

407: Nintendo strictly controlled third-party development.

411: It introduced a lock-out chip so that any unauthorized games

414: would be “locked out”, they couldn't be played.

417: The company also decided that approved video games would carry the official Nintendo seal.

422: Nintendo managed to win back the public's trust and the gaming industry started to recover.

427: By 1989, Nintendo dominated the market, earning $2.5 billion in revenue a year,

434: and around 70% of North America's video game market share,

439: largely thanks to the stunning success of Super Mario Bros.

444: Yokoi would personally mentor the game's designer, Shigeru Miyamoto.

450: Yokoi convinced him to give Mario superhuman qualities,

453: like the ability to fall from any height unharmed.

456: Super Mario Bros helped Nintendo wipe out its competitors.

460: The mustachioed plumber with overalls and a

463: red cap was such a hit that Mario became Nintendo's official mascot.

468: Instead of sitting pretty with the success of its console,

471: Nintendo reinvented itself again when Yokoi invented his greatest success.

477: The bulky grey brick won the hearts of the world upon its release in 1989.

483: When Yokoi started to design the Game Boy, he implemented a development philosophy called

488: “Lateral thinking with withered technology” which means innovative ideas can lead to new

494: products using pre-existing technology... as opposed to producing cutting-edge technology.

499: Yokoi's goal was to build a product that was inexpensive enough to mass produce

504: so that it was affordable for consumers. And - it also had to be fun, of course.

510: Nintendo decided to use a monochrome LCD screen

513: instead of color because the battery life lasted longer,

516: and it was easier to see under direct sunlight which allowed people to enjoy playing outdoors.

522: It wasn't perfect, though; the screen had a green tint and the characters were always very blurry.

527: Yokoi agonized over that small screen, and at one point,

531: was so stressed that he stopped eating and was diagnosed with acute malnutrition.

536: He recalled: "I considered it my biggest failure. At one point, I honestly contemplated suicide."

544: Yet what he considered his biggest failure turned out to be his greatest success.

550: What Yokoi didn't realize then was that people are okay with imperfections.

555: Kids didn't really care about the specs. They just wanted a fun, highly addictive portable game.

561: By the way, the big difference between the Game

563: Boy and Game & Watch is that Game & Watch could only play one game,

568: whereas you could swap out the cartridges on the Game Boy and play whatever game you wished.

572: The Game Boy sold a million units in the U.S. in just a few weeks

577: and would go on to sell nearly 120 million units in total worldwide.

583: So, when he left the company in 1996 to start his own gaming company, people were shocked.

589: Japanese executives tended to stay at one company for life, so some speculated that he was fired.

595: Also, the follow-up to the game boy - the virtual boy - was a commercial failure.

600: It was a video game console that used virtual reality technology

600: but it was a flop because it was costly and uncomfortable to wear.

602: Yokoi was 55 years old when he started Koto Laboratory,

606: which eventually released a handheld gaming console called WonderSwan in

611: partnership with Bandai (Band-dye) in order to compete with the Game Boy.

614: But Yokoi would never see WonderSwan hit the market. Because…tragedy struck.

621: On October 4, 1997, he was a passenger in a car that rear-ended a truck on an expressway about

628: 200 miles northwest of Tokyo. When Yokoi and the driver, a business associate, got out to examine

634: the damage, another car struck them, killing Yokoi. His associate suffered a fractured rib.

641: Gunpei Yokoi was 56 years old.

645: His tombstone is inscribed with the dates of his top creations.

650: One reason Yokoi was so successful is that he had a deep understanding of what people desired.

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