14 Facts About Gunpei Yokoi

Gunpei Yokoi, sometimes transliterated Gumpei Yokoi, was a Japanese video game designer.

Gunpei Yokoi was first hired by Nintendo in 1965 to maintain the assembly-line machines used to manufacture its hanafuda cards.

In 1966, Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo at the time, came to a hanafuda factory where Gunpei Yokoi was working and took notice of a toy, an extending arm that Gunpei Yokoi made for his own amusement during spare time while doing maintenance.

Yamauchi ordered Gunpei Yokoi to develop it as a proper product for the Christmas rush.

The Ultra Hand was a huge success, and Gunpei 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".

Gunpei Yokoi 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.

In 1981, Yamauchi appointed Gunpei Yokoi to supervise Donkey Kong, an arcade game created by Shigeru Miyamoto.

Gunpei 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 Gunpei Yokoi brought Miyamoto's game ideas to the president's attention.

Gunpei Yokoi 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.

Amid the failure of the Virtual Boy and the launch of the more successful Game Boy Pocket, Gunpei Yokoi left Nintendo on 15 August 1996 after thirty-one years at the company.

Gunpei Yokoi held that toys and games do not necessarily require cutting-edge technology; novel and fun gameplay are more important.

Nintendo's emphasis on peripherals for the Wii has been pointed to as an example of Gunpei Yokoi's "lateral thinking" at work.

On 4 October 1997, Gunpei Yokoi was riding in a car driven by his associate Etsuo Kiso on the Hokuriku Expressway, when the vehicle rear-ended a truck.

In 2003, Gunpei Yokoi posthumously received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Game Developers Association.