Near miss
Gunpei Yokoidraft
Creator of Game & Watch and the Game Boy, inventor of the D-pad, and producer of Metroid. Yokoi's philosophy of lateral thinking with withered technology is Nintendo's founding design doctrine.
- Born
- 1941
- Nationality
- Japanese
- Active
- 1965 to 1997
- Studios
- Nintendo, Koto Laboratory
Why it matters
Yokoi misses the ten because his lessons are about hardware and product more than about the design of play, but the doctrine sits under every Nintendo entry in the atlas. He was also Miyamoto's first supervisor, which makes him the root of the list's longest lineage.
Lessons
01 · process
Lateral thinking with withered technology
Yokoi's rule for Nintendo hardware: do not chase the state of the art, take a mature, cheap, well-understood technology and find a use nobody has tried. Game & Watch used calculator LCDs; the Game Boy beat colour handhelds with a monochrome screen and a week of battery. The lesson transfers to software: the constraint you already understand is the one you can be inventive inside.
- bookGunpei Yokoi and Takefumi Makino, Yokoi Gunpei Game House (ASCII, 1997)
- articleNintendo's little-known product philosophy: lateral thinking with withered technology (Medium)
Known for
- Game & Watch1980 · creator
- Metroid1986 · producer
- Game Boy1989 · hardware designer
Levels in the atlas (0)
Derived from level entries, not maintained here.
No level entries credit this designer yet.
Sources
- bookGunpei Yokoi and Takefumi Makino, Yokoi Gunpei Game House (ASCII, 1997)
- articleNintendo's little-known product philosophy: lateral thinking with withered technology (Medium)