Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 341: Gunpei Yokoi (Pt. 1)

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

Jeremy Parish speaks to Bill Mudron and Matt Alt about the work of Nintendo legend Gunpei Yokoi and how his innovative pre-video game creations reflect the post-war culture and industrial boom Japan experienced during the ’60s and ’70s.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, nice game, boy. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts at the moment. This is going to be episode 341, a very significant number. Actually, I'm lying. There's no significance to that. It's just the number that this episode will be if everything goes according to plan. And I am Jeremy Parrish, for whom nothing goes according to plan. And therefore, it's a surprise to all of us.

But that's okay, because this will be, I think, a good episode, nice and loose, but also informative. And it's an episode featuring someone who, surprisingly, has never been on the show before, despite being a supporter and sometimes contributor to the show in other capacities. So please, introduce yourself, newcomer. Is that me? That would be you. Oh, because Matt's been on the podcast. I've been on before. So this is all your show now.

My name is Bill Muddron. I'm an artist, and yeah, I guess I have contributed to, well, more Jeremy's books than retronauts proper, but some of his books and stuff, yeah, have contributed illustrations and little things like that. I used to do some artwork for Electronic Gaming Monthly before that died. I contributed artwork to GamePro before that died. Nintendo Power before that died. Yeah, I drew the last Howard and Nestor strip, and Nintendo Power killed that. Yeah, I am a serial murderer of Internet video game magazines. Well, you know, someone's got to kill him.

Exactly. So hopefully, yeah, hopefully retronauts will last more than six months after this episode. Just don't draw for us and we should be fine. I just, I want to hear more about the very last, was it a very special episode of Howard and Nestor? What was the last episode? I don't want to be that guy who's like, did you not read the last episode? No, yeah, no, it was Phil Theobald who worked at Nintendo Power. He, uh, I knew him just from his own podcast, uh, Player One podcast.

And we were buddies and he wrote me. And he was like, I have an idea. I want to do one last, like, Howard and Nester strip for the last issue of Nintendo Power. And I drew that in, like, a weekend. And so I got to contribute to that. And I also set them up with the person who sculpted the Nintendo Power tribute to the first issue, which was the Oh, wow. Wow.

Oh, and you guys haven't seen this yet because it's going up in, like, a week from this recording. But we just did a Nintendo Power episode of the show. And John Pating put together a Claymation style cover illustration for. the episode. It is above and beyond what is reasonable. Oh, that is amazing. What it, yeah, it's above and beyond what is reasonable for a weekly podcast like cover illustration that a lot of people won't even see. It's just insane. It's so good. What did he sculpt? Like, what's the image? Uh, it's, you know, it's kind of a reference to, uh, the first issue of Nintendo power. It's got, you know, Mario and, okay, well, we'll have to find out what it is. Okay. Like,

it'll, it'll be up by the time this is out, but yeah. Okay. It's, uh, it's pretty wild. So, that is cool anyway i don't want to get too bogged down in this stuff before we even start the episode so who else is on the line with us all the way from tokyo japan who am i i'm matt alt i'm the author of it was very existential why am i here i'm matt alt i'm the author of pure invention how japan's pop culture conquered the world and yes i do live in tokyo where i plot my own personal world domination but it has been going very well so far. Just waiting on that

second impact. All right. Yeah, so this episode, we are talking about the life of Gumpé Yokoi, who we have mentioned many times in passing throughout the years on Retronauts. You can't really talk about Game Boy or Virtual Boy or

Game and Watch or really Nintendo's history without mentioning Yokoi, but we've never really talked about him specifically, which unless I'm just totally mistaken and somehow completely failed in searching through the back catalog to find an episode on Yokoy, which is entirely possible. Sometimes that happens. We've recorded like... Well, after 340 episodes, yeah. Well, that's the numbered episodes. That's not including the micro episodes and the shows that

came before the Kickstarter. So there's like 600 episodes of Retronauts out there. And honestly, like, I do searches, you know, when I'm like, have we tackled this topic before? And sometimes a search, you know, through not only my own archives and files and our paperwork, but even on Google, like, doesn't turn up anything. And then Bob's like, well, no, actually, we did that like seven years ago. And you probably don't remember because you were like stoned or something, except I don't get stoned. So I don't know what the excuse is. Just senile, I guess. Well, you have justification now.

Hopefully your podcasting standards have increased. So you know if you happen to do an episode of Gepa, Yolkai before you, this one will be the new and pretty. Rood special edition episode of... And he's a perennial favorite. He deserves as many podcasts as one could give to him. He deserves better than us. So shall we set the stage here for people who, for like the three people in your audience,

maybe who don't know who he is? Yes, go for it. Oh, am I doing this? Yeah, well, go on to your point. You called down the thunder. Born in 194X. I actually don't know the date of his birth. I think it's 41.

Thank you, 1941. Not that we do that by heart, we just happened to look at Wikipedia, I like that timing in from both sides. I heard like 1941 coming in from both ears there. I mean, I've got the notes open that I put together, so it's... Well, so Yolkoy was born and raised in the Kyoto area, I believe, correct? And that would make sense. It seems like everyone at Nintendo is kind of from, from the olden times was from that area. And my understanding from reading, and he wrote an autobiography right after he left Nintendo. It's called Yokoi Gumpai GameCon, and, uh, which is like, Yoko

Gunpe Yokoi's Hall of Games. And it came out in, I think, 96 or 97, and he wrote it together with a writer. And that basically is where I'm getting most of my information from. Okay. Which is great, because that hasn't been translated into English officially or in any capacity that I'm aware of. So it's one of those great video game history resources that just, it's not out there. Like, it's not available for those of us who don't read Japanese. I've got a copy of it for a project I was working on, and I was hoping to use some kind of babblefish or something like that to try to translate at least some of it, and I just couldn't. So I knew somebody who there would have to be somebody like Matt who knew how to speak Japanese or read Japanese at least.

Yeah. He's a translator, so he's on top of things. Yes, I am. Yeah, well, you know, it came, you know, I read, I had to read that book cover to cover when I was, you know, researching my own book. But it's just, it's really interesting because it's kind of half and half split between Makino-san, who's, I think. forget his first name, the writer who teamed up with Yokoy and probably convinced Yokoi to do the book. And so it switches from this kind of third person thing to this first person like, oh, I was a grizzled college student when I first encountered a pinball machine,

like kind of thing. And so it's cool. It has that kind of contextualization and Yoko's own voice. And in his own voice, he said, when he got out of college where he majored in engineering, he was this kind of unambitious, you know, not really driven to, I don't want to say not driven to succeed, but he just wasn't as ambitious as his fellow classmates who were all landing these plum jobs, summit local concerns like, I believe, Hayakawa Electric, which became sharp later on and other big, you know, companies and stuff. And he was kicking around. He couldn't find a job, and he didn't want to leave Kyoto. That was like his big thing. He's like, I just want to live the rest of my life in peace and quiet here. That's the one thing I know is that, like, yeah,

I always had the image of my head of him just kind of bumming around Kyoto. I didn't realize he was actually from there, but like, okay, that's kind of cute, actually, that he was, he didn't want to leave home. Yeah, he didn't want to leave home. And he literally says that in his book. He's like, you know, my only, my only concern in applying to a job was I didn't want to have to, like, move to another city. And the funny thing was, the job he applied to Nintendo, it wasn't even an engineering position. Right. It was more like maintenance. Yeah, he's like the janitor practically. It's like, he's basically like keeping these old Hana Fuda machines running, you know? I was going to say, well, that's when they were just making nothing but Hana Fuda machines.

right? Because he's the guy who introduced the whole idea of like, hey, we could make something. No, I mean, he started at Nintendo in 1965. So he was pretty fresh, yeah, fresh out of college, 24 years old. So at that point, you know, post-World War II, Matt could probably speak to this more accurately, but yeah. But post-World War II, they, you know, Hiroshi Yamuchi was like, we got to make some money. We can't just do Hanafuda. We got to try all kinds of things. So that was, that was kind of their period of just like throwing any shit at the wall and hoping. something sticks. You know, that's the... Okay, so they already had the Love Hotels. The Love Hotels, the failed instant rice, licensing, like, Mickey Mouse and Snoopy characters, yeah, like

Disney characters. It was, and actually, there's a, there's a moment where Yoko, not Yoko, but Yamauchi actually flies out to Anaheim and is given a tour of the Disney kind of facilities by Roy Disney. And that, I, I, you know, he didn't explicitly write this, but like, to me, that is probably the moment where he's like, wow, multinational character entertainment concern. I like this. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, that must have been, yeah, Yamuichi's first step towards thinking about how, how do we make Nintendo more of a global presence and not just like some super regional Kyoto based making old musty cards? Well, I'm assuming that must have been what led them to actually making, because I know they eventually did end up doing licensed Disney card. So I'm

assuming that must have been the impetus for that. So, yeah. Yeah, well, and that, and the Disney cards were also key because that allowed them I don't think you could sell Hanafuda cards in the toy store because they're meant for like grownups and like by putting Disney on playing cards like suddenly they became almost like Pokemon cards collectible cards and that was

Nintendo's first pivoted to toys yeah I was about to say that's you're crafting a narrative here the logical you know it's not just the musty facts and figures on Wikipedia that's why they pay me the big bucks But on the whole Nintendo's forays into all, you know, all these various ventures into, you know, all these various ventures did not do that well.

The company was still really kind of struggling, I think, in a lot of ways. That's the impression I get. Like, most of Yamuchi's ideas didn't turn out so well. Like, he kind of grew into being the mastermind. This is a totally insider conversation that I only learned about obliquely when I was interviewing people for the book. But there is, and I promise this has a connection. There's a really famous Japanese toy company called Marusan that was like the first company to license and make Godzilla figures. and like Ultraman figures.

They're like basically the first action figures. They made a soft vinyl. And they made a fortune off these things because in the 1966-ish time frame, there was a huge boom for Kaiju, giant monster movies and shows and stuff, right? And Nintendo was into this too. Nintendo actually made a really crappy Godzilla board game set

featuring little vinyl Kaiju toys. Was it actually licensed Godzilla? Yes, they actually licensed it. But Mar-San was the first one to realize that, you know, these monster shows would be something that appealed to kids. Now it seems like really obvious, right? Like, duh, kids are going to want to play with giant monsters. But back then, it was thought that monsters and the kaiju from Ultraman

were too scary for kids. And now we know that... I was about to say mid-60s, that's right when Godzilla really started becoming... That's when you had... Gamera had, you know... That's when the kaiju thing really kind of started turned towards kiddy stuff. Exactly.

But it hasn't been known as being that yet. Yeah. So Mar-San goes boom and then it goes bust. And it's about to go out of business. and they go to their banker for their bank for a loan. And the bank is like, we're not going to give you a loan unless you really reorganize. We have this other struggling company

that we think you should talk to and you should merge with. And it turned out to be Nintendo. Nintendo shared the same bank. And so there's a moment where the president of Marusan and the president of Nintendo meet at this like hot spring resort in Atami and try to discuss whether they can merge their companies together. And my, the person who I understand,

interviewed, a guy named Sabago Ishizuki, who is the person who actually came up with those kaiju figures in the first place. It was like, the two big personalities, it was like destined to fail. There was just no way it was going to happen. Mar-San went under. Nintendo did not. And the rest is history. The end. So that's the end of that anecdote. But that's just an interesting moment and not a lot of people know about where like this, like, Nintendo could have turned into a kaiju toy company. Well, it's interesting that Nintendo probably floated by in the fact that like there, you know, there's always these whims and fads and stuff with the toy industry whereas with cards

everyone's kind of going to need to play playing cards maybe they don't always have to play Nintendo cards but well at least I've been God knows how many people are actually playing with playing cards now in the 21st century but within the scope of the 20th century though at least they had a reserve of cash and consumer

attention that they always could kind of fall back on so I could see yeah why they may have weathered the storm when actual toy toy toy companies may not have but you know yeah you know it's easy to kind of make fun of Yama Tamauchi for trying all these crazy different things, like instant rice, you know, taxi company. But, you know, they think- I mean, he made a lot of very shrewd choices.

It's just he had to kind of find, he had to find that kind of, you know, what is the secret sauce here? What is the magic? And it turns out the answer was Gumpi-Yokoi. Mr. Gumpi-Yokoi, yes. So hired in 1965, right? And so he just comes on, he's oiling, he's oiling Hanafuda machines, I believe, is like his He's like sweeping up around Hana Futa machines. Yeah, I mean, he was kind of Nintendo's own Maytag repair man, just like hanging out there after hours, waiting for the Hana Fuda machines to break down, which I get the impression didn't happen that much because apparently he had a lot of downtime where he would just be like, well, time to kill some dead time.

And instead of like watching TV or reading a book or something, he would make stuff, like invent things. Yes. And he had access to a machine. machine shop. And that was like the key thing. So Yo Koi in his in his autobiography talks about he'd always been kind of like a tinker and maker of things. And when he was a little kid, he was obsessed with like model trains and apparently built such an incredible like diorama model train layout that some train magazine actually came down from Tokyo to photograph it. Oh wow. I'd love to see. And I've been trying to track that down. There must be the story must be in a magazine somewhere. I mean, there couldn't be that many model train magazines. Exactly. Like, but good any of that surviving to this day to be found in scanned but like, oh man, that'd be great to see you though. That's really

interesting. I feel like there's maybe an episode to be put together about the influence of model trains on video games because, you know, Space War was created by MIT's Model Railway Club. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, they started tinkering. They were just, you know,

creating railway trains to scale, you know, coming up with traction, thing. And even today, train simulations and things. They started using the, you know, the huge mainframe computers at MIT to like come up with switching signals and stuff for their, their trains tracks and simulations and stuff. And then that kind of evolved into video games and space war. So there's, you know, I think that was kind of like before there were really computers and video games. Like if you were kind of into tinkering and systems and things like

like that you were into railway railway trains there's also hudson yeah yeah i mean that's the stuff that that's what people played with like you said before video games there wasn't that much and especially not to how we need to get forward and keep on talking about yukoi's life but like it's also interesting to think he was only like 10 years old in like the early 1950s where japan was still in its reconstruction era and things where resources were limited so he would have had to have been really resourceful with grabbing everything he could to you know build the little talent and models and toy trains and stuff like that too. Which, of course, that leads into the, we'll get into that later.

That's the whole defining thing of Gunpey Okoi. You know, I never thought about that, but yeah, you're absolutely right. Like his... I got to think about that while reading Matt's book about how, yeah, like his generation grew up, like, scrimping and... Yeah. Right, yeah. It just never occurred to me to apply that to his specific paradigm.

But, yeah, that makes so much sense. I mean, you had to, yeah, black markets and stuff like that back then, you know? I mean, that first product, after World War II, the tin jeep is made out of, like, hammered out beer cans and stuff. I didn't know. It was, like, that got that bad that, like, they were actually, like, yeah, like, I almost imagine kids playing with toys with, like, the

beer label still stamped on or something like that. Here comes the Schlitzmobile. The Schlitzmobile. Okay. Malt liquor. So, actually, this, the train thing leads directly into our next topic, which is that Yokoi, when he was, I don't know where he sourced his materials.

He made it sound like he got them at a shop or something. But he, when he was a little kid, one of his, one of his inventions was he got a bunch of either plastic or wooden sticks and kind of pegged them together into this weird accordion arm device thing. And he played, you know, he just screwed around with it and played with it as a kid. And then one day at Nintendo, when he was bored because he'd already fixed the Tanafuda machines, he used the machine shop to make like this childhood invention of his in actual sturdy materials. Right. This is like the modern day equivalent of someone who has neat ideas and then they get a job where they have unfettered access to a 3D printer and they're like, wow, the world is my little oyster. And then he makes this thing and then President Yamauchi finds out and gets and like summons him to the office and he thinks he's about to get fired for screwing around and using company materials on, you know, on the clock.

Yeah. Well, especially with this imperious as Yamauchi was supposed to have been in every. everything like that, yeah. It creates a very specific picture. How did word get back to Yamauchi? Was there like a rat in the machine shop? Like, Mr. Yamauchi? If you're Steven Spielberg and you're dramatizing this for a film, you have Yamauchi up in his office overlooking the show floor or whatever, and he can see Yokoi fiddling

around and the camera pans up and see you. I don't think Nintendo headquarters in 1960s was, you know, the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. That's what I was expecting Smithers, exactly. It's just kind of like twiddling. Homer at the beginning of the Simpsons with a metal rod, yeah. Smithers, bring me that man with the telescoping arms. That's what I'm picturing, though. But that's, we don't know.

That's the terrible thing. We have no idea and we'll never find out. Well, actually, I think you guys can take it from here because that Yamauchi basically said, no, you're not fired. Make this into a product. And it became, drum roll please. The ultra hand. Yeah. And you mentioned Kaiju earlier. And the name Ultra hand comes from kind of the Ultraman mania. Like everything was coming up Ultra in the mid-60s. So they were like, let's jump on that. And so they just, you know, straight up took the prefix ultra because it was a hip cool, I guess not. technically English, it's Greek, I guess, but whatever. It's, you know, it's foreign. It's a kind of a loan word. It's cool and futuristic and fun. And this thing became a huge hit. It was their first million-selling product, apparently, that was not a Hana Futa card. I'm sure those sold, you know, a million over the course of many years, but this was like a real hit, like a fad, like a thing

that kids wanted. And, you know, it was, it was very intuitive. Like, I had not a, probably an official Nintendo one but you know when I was a kid I had or my grandparents had one of these things and it was just like a goofy little toy that you could use and you know it's basically has little rubber grips on

one end and then handles on the other and it works just like you know an accordion fence or something and you open it up and it contracts and you close it and it expands it's like a loony tunes thing you know yeah there's so many horrible things that a kid can imagine themselves getting

up to with one of those things. Half of those things aren't going to work out because it's never going to be as cool in reality as you kind of dream when you see the commercial or something like that. Yeah, and Yamauchi insisted they make it into a game. That was the big thing. And Yoko is like, what, like, Yoko is literally in his autobiography is like, how, what do you mean make it into a game? It's just a silly accordying arm. What are we going to turn this into, like, grab ass the board game? Like, what they're like? That's where the balls come in. Oh, no. Okay. It comes packaged with your, the balls I'm referring to are a little

bouncy rubber balls, and they come packaged with the magic hand, and you're supposed to, like, use it to pick the balls up and put them in little cups, you know, as kind of a test of skill. I don't know how many people actually did that. So it was, it was Rob, the robot operating buddy and stack up, like 10 years, no, 20 years before Rob was a thing. It was. Fess up, did either you guys even know what this was before playing warrior wear? Oh, no way.

Yeah, I'd heard of it. I didn't know. No way. This stuff is just, there's just not much information about. Nintendo's you see all of these articles and like the articles I've written have been guilty about this too like let's talk about Nintendo's early years and it's like 1970 when the company's already been around for like a century exactly you know what I mean and like nobody there's very little like written about Nintendo what was Nintendo like in the 1930s do

know what I mean like there must be a story there too but like you know basically history for Nintendo begins with Donkey Kong for a lot of people yeah or radar scope right but yeah there's there's a blog that I highly recommend it was where I did a lot of the research for my notes for this episode or just having done previous research called Before Mario and it is literally just a blog about Nintendo creations as stretching as far back as they can find up through the advent of Donkey Kong

and it turns out there was a lot of stuff. That's cool. Yeah, in the 70s they created all kinds of interesting toys and Yokoi had a huge hand in most of them because, you know, basically the success of Ultrahand was such that Yamauchi was like, okay, you're my guy now. You are heading up our research and development division. Yeah, it was basically R&D won before R&D won.

Well, I mean, that was, he was basically the head of R&D. And then as more people kind of came into the fold and sort of proved their creative metal and, you know, came up with successes and said, made Yamauchi say, you're, you've got the stuff. and I want you to, you know, kind of have this authority. So then you had these other R&D divisions happen. You had R&D2, R&D3, and then eventually R&D4, which was, you know, I think it was Ginyo Takeda, Masayuki, Uamura. Maybe I got those two mixed up.

Well, UiMur, I thought was two. Yeah, UiMura is two, because he's, yeah, he's got that seniority. Then Takeda was R&D3, and then Shigeramiyamoto, after Donkey Kong was R&D4, which became EAD. So can I talk about Ue Mura for a second? Yeah, yeah. When I sat down, I sat down to talk to UyMura a couple years back for the book, and recently Kotaku actually published the full transcript of that conversation. But at one point he said, so Yokoi hired him from Sharp, which I think was still like

Hayakawa Electric at that point. It hadn't changed its name to Sharp. And I asked, when I asked Uemura what his recollections were very, very early on in his career at Nintendo, he said, the thing. he remembered most was they had a literal warehouse that was full like top to bottom Raiders of the Lost Ark style with like imported toys and games and board games and stuff and that was as he called it. That they were distributing or just as research? No, no, no, no. That was their R&D facility. Like you would go in there and take out. And you know,

and Nintendo had actually distributed a lot of Western games. Like Nintendo, I don't know if you're aware of this, they distributed Twister to Japan. I can't, I can't imagine Japanese people playing Twister in their like tea rooms, but thanks to Nintendo. Well, that's a good way to figure out the market without having to invest any real skin in the game in terms of like making that stuff yourself, is that do you distribute? Kind of like how Tonka was what's supposed to distribute the... Yeah, or San Rio and Peanuts. Like, Sanrio's distributing peanuts is what gave them the entire idea of like, well, the dog is a hit.

Maybe we should make a kitty, you know, kind of thing. So, like, it makes perfect sense. Yeah, Nintendo imported and licensed a lot of games from the West. And then sometimes when they couldn't get the license or didn't want to pay for the license, they just came up with their own variance. There was Nintendo Block, which was just Lego. It was just Lego, but it was called Nintendo Block, and there was like a, you know, very slight difference for, you know, patent reasons.

As a board game example, the game Perfection, which, you know, I don't know if you remember perfection, but it's basically like kind of this deep-seated board with shapes cut into it, different shapes. and the shapes correspond to plastic pieces, and you basically have a set amount of time to take this jumble of plastic pieces and put them all in the corresponding holes in the board. Otherwise, they all pop out and explode at you

when the timer comes up. They didn't license perfection, but what they did is Yokoi designed it into a variant called TimeShok, which was interesting because instead of being a square board, it's circular, and it has like two rings. Like there's just a fixed ring on the outside And then the inner ring is this blue plastic ring

And it rotates And it has 10 different places it can be So basically There are 10 different states For this board game So that it wasn't always the same layout So it was basically like Wow so it's like that 4D Vulcan chess game

And Star Trek as compared to human chess That's what sounds like yeah Something like that It's basically just It's perfection but with, you know, with a less predictable board layout. So it forces you to be more kind of on the ball when you play. So that was basically him taking that existing idea and saying,

I can do it better. And, you know, it's pretty cool. So what were we talking about before perfection? We were talking about all of the cool inventions he came up with in the 70s. Yeah. Like the Roomba. Can we talk about the Roomba? Yes, please do.

You mean Chitori? No, it's just a little battery-powered vacuum. It's a little battery-powered vacuum. I think it's remote-controlled, so there's no AI in it or anything. But it's just another example of kind of the wacky guy. But it's still the same idea of like a remote, I mean, it's a robot, but yeah, instead of, you know, Roomba that, you know, cleans by itself, you have to control. But still not entirely dissimilar to the Roomba, really, yeah. No, well, it's like Rob, but just much more boring, you know?

A little, slightly more useful. The interesting thing is, do you remember the game Dustforce from like five or six years ago? They, um, there, there was like a 3DS game. I think it was by Capcom. but the PR sent out little press kits for it and it had something very similar to Chitty Tori as part of it and I wish I had known about this little Nintendo gadget back at the time because I would have actually been more impressed by the fact that

hey Capcom is kind of ripping off vintage Nintendo here but foolish me I hadn't read before Mario yet so my bad I think the number one invention he came up with in the 70s that people would actually really care about is laser clay the light gun game. Well, I mean, he came up with love tester. Oh, and well, of course. We all need to test our love.

So that is important. Well, I mean, that's just, that's ubiquitous. Like, love tester is in every bar, every kind of divey arcade, like, pre-deat, like the Grandpa Simpson love machine. Is that like... That is the love machine. Like, that is the love tester. That's what it is.

It's just like a... Yeah, it's like you grab it. So the love tester sounds like a sex toy, but it's actually like this thing that you grab in both hands and it tells you, like, how hot your passion is. Yeah, we should. should describe what this stuff is because yeah if you just talk about what the name it just sounds nuts it's just detecting like the differential uh between the electrical current in your body versus conductivity of yeah yeah yeah and are you supposed to like hold hands you hold hands it's an excuse

like yukoi said it was an excuse to hold hands with a girl like okay hold hands and then you you're free hand you're holding hands in the middle and then your free hand each grabs one terminal that's a great sales tactic to be like yeah yeah that's very popular but i mean that is that is something that is, it's like a universal gadget. I'm sure it was ripped off, you know, all the things you've seen in arcades and stuff probably weren't Nintendo made, but that concept

just, you know, it was everywhere. One thing I do want to talk about before we get to the laser clay range, just because I think that's going to leave a lot of other stuff, is the Elyconga, which is an electric Congo drum that had like an analog synthesizer inside. It's basically

a drum machine before there were drum machines. Kind of like. rock band a little bit in that like you weren't supposed to smack the drum there's just five buttons on the top that each one is preset to a different like sound that would play and that's like it plays an analog

sample yeah have either of you played with it I haven't no I guess if I saw one in real life I'd have to steal it because I think it may be my favorite old Nintendo thing I've ever heard about because it's so crazy the wild thing about eliconga is it's shaped like a congo drum yeah it would

but like really not even like a toy conga drum. No, it's like a real conga drum. Yeah. But then if you look on the side, there's a port you can open up and it has an XLR port and you can plug it into an actual like amplifier and use it to play instruments. And not only that, but there was there was an add on device that you could buy called the auto player. This is my favorite part. This is, yeah. There was the auto player and you could program it to basically play drum sequences. So yes, this was a drum machine before, you know, Roland and everyone were making drum machines

in the late 70s, early 80s. Is Yokoi like the fifth member of the Beastie Boys then? Does this? Yeah, no, I mean, I'm shocked that no one has like gone on stage with one. There's no in the air tonight without going to Yolkoy. Oh, man, if you could reprogram. Oh, man. So that's, you would win the internet for at least a day if you could do in the air

tonight on the Ella, on the Alaconga. Yeah, my favorite part of Alaconga, though, is that attachment thing. The way it plays like pre-recorded music is that it's reading off. of like an old, what's the automated piano stuff called? A player piano? It's a little paper disc with holes punched it that reads kind of like that that whole punched piece of paper that looks like a viewmaster, but like reads it like a player piano.

So you've got like this player piano technology feeding into this analog synthesizer drum that looks like a professional $500 conga drum. And who the hell would ever buy this but Nintendo made it? and it's just Wow It's like steam punk You describe it It sounds like a steampunk invention

It sounds like a fever dream Like our coke binge I don't I This is the same inspiration The font of inspiration That gave us Wii music This is like the opposite of Wii music

Oh Like here's pretend instruments That you're playing in the air Man they would have probably made more money If they just reissued Elakanga rather than Wii music But Probably so

I'm gonna look for this on Yahoo Japan auctions. It's like where old toys go to die in Japan or Mandarake or something like that. GoFundMe going so we could buy one of those for the Retronauts podcast. I wonder if they even work anymore if we can find one. I think the real problem with the Elaconga is getting enough batteries to power it because it took like I think six C-cell batteries. Do you even remember C-cell batteries? Like, do they still make those? And then you also had to put in two double A's. They're like a quarter of the size of a Coke can. And that's the thing that all this stuff, well, that's the other funny thing. Like all this

stuff ran on like five pounds of batteries. Yeah. And it's just like even, and I'm sure like barely any of the three Alacongas they must have sold, I'm sure most of them must be destroyed because I'm sure those batteries all leaked 50 years ago and destroyed the end of that stuff. This is a big problem when you're collecting like old tin toys and stuff that people left their batteries in and it's just rots. And I mean, that's one of the great things about these toys because these toys were all created before laws existed that would keep them from killing kids. And, but like a long guard. crazy stuff like this as a result

though, but yeah. Well, I don't think the Alaconga could really kill anybody. You'd have to like bludgeon them with it. All right. So one more thing before we get into, well, two more things before we get into laser clay. And that is the fact that the ultra hand was actually a line of products. There was

also ultroscope and the ultra machine. The ultroscope now was like a periscope, as I recall. Yeah, it was like a toy periscope, basically. Not a good product and a country with notorious number of peeping Tom's, but let's leave that

for another discussion. You had to ruin Ultrascope for everybody. I mean, it's kind of hard to be subtle on the train with that thing, so... Because that thing is like the size of a stack of dictionaries. It's not like so. It's like, it is the actual size

of a con tower on a submarine. It's huge. Exactly, yeah. Yes. And it telescopes. Like, literally you're supposed to like, I guess the idea in the package was you're like hiding behind a like wall, like a fence or something and spying over it. It's so clumsy. I mean, that also just

adds to the charm or the ridiculous. And all that mid-century clunk is just fantastic. But I think, you know, the important thing about all this stuff is that, you know, Yochoy was this master of like actual physical, real world analog playfulness. Like, he didn't start as a programmer. He didn't start

as like a circuit dude. He's just like, oh, mirrors and rubber bands. What can I do with this? You know? And it makes sense that like later on, he really wasn't known from being a game designer, but still just more of a tinker. And, like, that's why his greatest contribution to Nintendo when it became gaming stuff was, like,

the Game Boy, as opposed to, like, any of the games. Well, you know, I imagine him as being, like, Caesar at the, at the Coliseum where he's just, like, people, like, are, like, racing around in front of him, and he, like, raises his thumb up or puts it down, and a product lives or dies, do you know what I mean? Like, fun, not fun, you know, is my

impression of him there. You know what I mean? But, you know, he was also good at, he did have a, a capacity for taking technological concepts, you know, gadgets and turning them into toys. Like the light telephone, I think, is a great example of that, which is basically it's like the next generation of tin cans and a string. Like instead of using a string for your tin cans, you're basically like broadcasting a beam of light that is then converted into sound.

So you like talk into this thing and it transmits that somehow as, as light, it turns the sound into light, and then it receives on the other end and turns the light back into sound. I can't imagine what that sounds like. Apparently, it actually sounded okay, like pretty clear. I, before recording this, I was desperate to find a video of this,

this working on YouTube, because sound transmitted over lights from like across the street if you're on a sunny day or something like that. You're just going to, whatever you end up receiving, it's going to be like, in Star Trek, in the motion picture, when they

received the people back and they're turned inside out, I imagine it would just be the audio version of that, but when you say this as you are connected with fiber optics to someone in Japan. Yes. That's true, too. That's a good point. It is that, it was kind of the future. But the internet doesn't run

on like a five set 10 watt bulb at the same time. Speak for yourself, man. My internet does. The internet in my house. I bet light telephone sounded better than Skype honestly. That's actually a good point. probably sounded better than a string in two tin cans. That's certain.

Stick together, Skype. Jesus crazy. Oh boy, I can't wait for future history 101 today. I hear Prof. Timesworth is going to teach us about World War Six. Gather around, students. It is time to learn. Podford University, where history and future are the same class. Available on iTunes, Spotify and everywhere you. get podcasts.

On Apocrypal's, we talk about the parts of the Bible that a lot of people skip over. Like the wizard battles. The angel jacuzis. A goat full of sins. 500 drunk elephants. And a man named Porky Party. And yes, that's all really in there. All this and more on Apocrypal's every other week on the Greenlit podcast network.

Retrograde Amnesia is a comprehensive podcast where we relive a classic Japanese RPG. Season one covers the cult class. Benno Gears. In season two, we're covering Chrono Cross. Each episode, we take a section of the game and unpack the story, mechanics, music, and themes. And we have an AI companion, the fake net. It'll make sense later. Find retrograde amnesia wherever

podcasts are found. Hey, folks, it's Asif Khan, CEO, editor-in-chief over there at shack-news.com. Give a listen to the Shackcast, the official Shack News podcast of Shack News, uh, over there on the Greenlit

podcast network. Well, I think the light telephone is handy because it kind of ties into the laser clay shooting system. It's a different application for light. Yes, he likes light. So Matt, this is your opportunity to shine. Laser clay. So laser clay was this, there was a, to set the stage for this, there was a huge boom for bowling in Japan in the like late 60s and early 70s, which I think parallel to similar

one in the United States, you know, when bowling really took off. And a lot of bowling alleys went up in Japan and then suddenly like kind of the boom faded. And there were all of these empty bowling alleys that people didn't really know what to do with. And Yokoi came up with the idea of of transforming bowling alleys. It's basically an accessory for sold to people who run bowling alleys to turn the lanes into virtual skeet shooting ranges using a light gun. And like Nintendo gambled hard on this.

Like Yamauchi went all in on this. Like they had a huge can't. They set up all these, they sold a lot of them to pre-sold a lot of them to various places. They had this whole campaign where Sunny Chiba of Street Fighter fame and many other movies Kill Bill. Yeah. Not the Street Fighter you're probably thinking of,

but the Colantino caliber. I'm talking the 1970s Street Fighter. Sister Street Fighter, yeah. Sister Street Fighter's Last Revenge. Slice a pie after the birthday movie kind of Street Fighter. Yes. Yes. To three Kung Fu movies.

I love... Man, Matt, you're already my best friend. I know. Come on. Man. So Sunny Chiba. Sonny Chiba. is there's an amazing photograph of Sunny Chiva with like a sought off shotgun used in the ads for this that I can't find anywhere

and I'm desperate for. Anyway, they pre-sell all this and then it's based on the exact same light gun technology that later was employed for duck hunt which is it's actually the gun isn't actually firing anything. The gun is a light detector detecting kind of minuscule infinitesimal flashes on the screen. I forgot that's how that works. It works backwards

from what you would think it would be. I thought the laser clay shooting system you had like a detector kind of in a set place and you were firing light beams from the gun. Is that not right? It's like Tenet. You're capturing the bullet back in the gun, I think. Yeah, I haven't seen Tenet because it's not safe to go to theaters in this country right now. It's in the preview.

It is interesting that, like, the technology they did use, just to kind of bring this back to a little bit of what we were talking about before. Not that I want to go back because it's beginning to move forward, like Tenet. But they got the light sensor technology came from. a dude from Sharp Electronics who one day showed up at Nintendo saying hey I work for Sharp Electronics would you guys like to use these light sensors that we've invented

at Sharp and Gumpay Ok is like yes that is awesome also I like you very much that dude's name was Masayuki Yamoro who like this is the first act of other people kind of coalescing around Yokoy at Nintendo who go on to become the core

of the Nintendo we know Yamora would go on to be the hardware designer between of the the Famicom and the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super Famicom and all that stuff. But they got their start together designing... Well, originally, it was the laser... The light shooting things.

Yeah, the Duck Hunt and the original version of WildGumman. But all this turned into the laser clay system, where, yeah, there's the big established laser shooting gun thingy-things. But yeah. So it sounds like it's a really cool idea, right? Like, I want to go to a bowling alley

with Sunny Cheeba and a shotgun. I mean, that sounds like... If it's 1973 and there's nothing else, to do. And I've already seen Sister Street Fighter 15 times. Yeah, why not? Yeah. Exactly. So, like, you're in, you know, this is, it sounds like it's, it's a recipe for awesomeness, but what happens? Like, there's an Arab oil embargo. The first oil shock hits. This is like 1970, or is the second oil shock. It's like 72, 73. Yeah, I think, I think this is the first one. And, um, yeah, Japan is a country that gets like 98% of its petroleum from overseas.

Yes. It doesn't really produce much of its own. So. And so the oil shock was a big deal, like, People are rioting, like, for toilet paper and stuff like that. It's, like, a really big deal. And, like, all of the corporate customers, they lined up canceled. And Nintendo, like, it just destroyed Nintendo. Like, plunged them, like, deep, deep, deep into the red. And, yeah, I mean, it didn't help that all the toys and products they were making were plastic, which requires petroleum. Yes, exactly.

And therefore, like, they were kind of hit, you know, both on the economic side and also on the materials side. So Sonny Chiba packed up a shotgun and went home. Yamauchi, you know, packed up. up, went to his love hotel, like, Yo-Coy is, like, relegated to the basement. Like, Nintendo is over, or is it? Don't ball. That's really the question. And then, but this is exactly the kind of event horizon.

And by the way, this is the event horizon where the television game is just starting to take off in the United States. Well, yeah, it's early 70s, yeah. And I think this might just inflect the history of Nintendo forever to be continued in the next 30 seconds. Yeah, this is the... I was like, wow, are we done? The end. At the end of the first episode of the 10-episode-long Netflix series about the history of Nintendo, pretty much, yeah.

So, no, but that's actually, that's the, would you guys agree that's basically what happened? Like, you know, there's the, the light game, the light gun, this is the technology, it goes bust, and Nintendo is screwed, and then they kind of pivot into trying to do arcade games. Well, this forces them to, yeah, exactly, still doing the kind of arcade stuff, but instead of having an entire fun center, you just have little installations that you could put up, put it, like, department. stores and things like that, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, it's not like that was, that was the result of the video game market because arcade installations existed already in the form of pinball and, you know, Sega got to start by distributing jukeboxes and stuff in Japan. Service games.

That's right. Namco got a start by doing like little, maintaining and distributing install, those little rides that kids can play, like the horses and stuff on springs and department stores. So, so this was kind of, you know, like a common theme. theme throughout the games industry. But the thing is before Nintendo started making consoles and video games, they did go through this like revised laser clay shooting system adaptation phase where they were basically taking the technology and condensing it to much smaller booths instead of saying, hey, you got to deck

out your whole bowling alley with Nintendo stuff. They're just like, hey, you've got some space, you've got an arcade or whatever. Here is a booth that's like the size of two jukeboxes. So what is that? Wild Gunman? There was Wild Gunman. There was also fascination, the one that they didn't produce, where you shoot clothes off a woman. Jesus, for giving me for laughing. God.

But, yeah, Wild Gunman was kind of their, like, their attempt to redeem the laser clay shooting system by basically, it's like a photo booth, basically. That's about the size of it. So you have the light reflecting technology. But instead of, you know, taking up an entire space, it was much smaller and much more affordable. And that actually did pretty well for them.

And I think those made it over to the U.S., didn't they? Well, that was all part of the whole, like the, what do they call it, the EMs, the electro-mechanical games that were kind of at the rage right before TV games. That's what I was about to point out. Like, none of this has any real, like, electronics as we know it. It's all just like, yeah, projectors. Pinball parts, essentially. Yeah, projectors and multiple film reels that already know even how you would engineer that because it's essentially a full motion video game, but it's using multiple film reels as opposed to even videotape or god knows a laser discs and trying to figure out

like how it switches from one film reel to another as you're shooting somebody is just i can't imagine how they well good news for you my friend yorkoy goes into huge huge obsessive detail about that in his book like oh wow okay so i wanted to build my own i could kind of crack open that book exactly roll your own yes you can roll your own wild goodman um exactly it's uh god don't tell me that sounds like a great, like, little indie movie, but a sad little geek who decides to make his own recreation of wild gunman, because he loves Nintendo so much. So you have the wild gunman toy, and then Yo-Koi takes out a step further and turns it into a home toy, which is where you come up with Duck Hunt, which basically took the same technology, where you have the image projector and you have the light that shoots a beam of light, and basically the projector also has a sensor on it.

so if you hit the duck that is projected on the wall dead center it's going to follow the same beam of light the duck is being projected from and is going to register a hit on the sensor so it's basically just like taking you know the the physics of light and turning it into a you know a shooting range by using reflections a simulation of killing things yeah and so then that was turned you know kind of adapted even further into something even smaller which was the Kosinju light gun series where you had basically a light emitting gun and then the sensor was actually on a small toy and the toy was a target so there was a custom lion and there was a custom gunman and these were like

little figures probably like I think six inches high or so and they had a light sensor on them. I just realized what you're saying Kosenju so Kosen is light beam and Jew is like the same Jew from Kaiju. It means beast so it's like like beam beast. So

it's like beam beast. I like this. Nice. So the custom lion and the custom gunmen were little figures and they had a, you know, light detection diode or whatever in them. And if you hit that, then the toy would collapse to register the hit. It would like kind of fall into a pile. The gunman is especially great.

Yeah, if you've played, again, if you've played warrior where you've done the thing where you shoot the gunman and he collapses. Well, the gunman's essentially one of those little rubber band dolls that they had back in the 80s, except now it's just tied to like electronic device to signal to collapse whenever it's hit, but yeah. And then kind of in between Duck Hunt and Kosinju Lightgun Custom Lion, you had Electro Safari and Electro Bird, which were a little like, they were like the size of a TV tray,

a TV dinner tray, and you kind of installed them on the wall and stood back the proper distance. And basically there was a spot where a little target would appear, you know, a bird or a lion or something, and you would shoot it, would have the, the lights detector in that creature, and if you hit, then it would disappear and another creature would pop up in its place. And it was basically just a test to see how

accurately and how quickly you could gun down these helpless, harmless animals like the monster you are. Yeah. By the way, I was wrong about the Jew. It's Jew as a gun. Sorry. Not Jew isn't Kaiju. Uh, fair way. But it's a hominem with the Kaiju, no Jew, and lots of other. There's so many hominemines. I'm sure it's not a mistake. I'm sure that. That's deliberate. Kind of, you know, again, tying back to alter hand, Ultraman,

like those have a very similar kind of way of being written out. Yes, and it was a kind of Wild West for copyright in Japan at the time where you could get away with making things that were very, very close.

You could create Nintendo Block. You could create Nintendo Block or you could make your own fake Kaiju or you could make your own fake Space Invaders. Did I just say that or think it? I think I said it. Well, is there much of a leap between, is it pretty much a straight than the Nintendo

decided? to start just saying, hey, well, if we're already making these home console TV games, and we're already kind of doing kind of arcade-y things with Wild Gunman, why don't we just make the leap to actually making, like, you know, actual electronic video game arcade units? I'm assuming that's the next step. My impression from Uwain Mora-San said that basically when Space Invaders hit in 78, as is his won't, Yamauchi bought a bunch of the machines and brought them into Nintendo's

headquarters for testing. And what ended up happening was the entire company ground to a halt because everybody got so obsessed with the machines. And Uwey Moore was... Oh, that's... I didn't even think about it. What would people just be inspired or didn't necessarily have to be a directive from Yamauchi?

Yeah. Well, he was like, play this and learn how to make games. What ended up happening was the R&D staff couldn't even get close to the machines because, like, you know, all of the every, like, you know, secretary, every, like, you know, janitor, every person on the payroll. was like in line to feed quarters into this rival machine. And that was what kind of really cemented to those guys that, you know, this whole Terriby game thing, TV games was the wave of the future, I think.

Yeah. So it's worth, it's worth mentioning that the color TV game series that Nintendo released their Pong clones were not made by Nintendo. They were made by Mitsubishi. They, and Nintendo basically just, you know, put colored shells on them and sold them with the Nintendo branding. but Nintendo did not make their own video games in the early days and when it came to the arcade games they didn't make their own arcade games either

they were you know farmed out usually to Ikegami Sushinki an electronics company that's still around still making like medical supplies and stuff like that actually they're a broadcast equipment manufacturer I think they made like back when Nintendo was working with them they made like all of the monitors for like TV stations

and things like that Ikegami monitors are still, like, their PVM type monitors are still very highly sought after by retro game fanatics. In fact, we would have probably been able to play a arcade version of Donkey Kong a lot sooner if Ikegami had gone out of business a long time ago. But, yeah, they want a programming, maybe I'm jumping the gun here, I apologize. But I just know them as the company that programmed Donkey Kong for Nintendo and then Nintendo stabbed them in the back. Well, they actually did the programming and manufacturing. They actually do the manufacturer, too. The board production on, like, all of Nintendo's games from the 70s, like Sheriff and Space Firebird and radar scope and so on and so forth.

Like, those were all Ikigami. And they did the actual, like, board design, the electronics, but the design of the games was usually headed up in the early days by Yokoy. So it's bringing it back. Bringing it back around to the topic. Yes. And this is actually what separates Nintendo, I think, from the other. game companies, which all had their own in-house R&D and programmers and stuff. And actually Nintendo's succitude, if I might be so bold, at actually making anything itself in-house,

is what allowed it, and Yo-Koi in particular, to separate, to come up with the idea that actually you don't have to be a programmer to be a good game designer. And in fact, in many ways, you don't want the game designer to be a programmer. They're kind of totally different skill sets. And I think that's really key to Nintendo's evolution is that, especially when Yo-Koi started working as more of like a producer than actually making stuff. Yeah. And, you know, of course,

the big thing that Yolkoy made that really changed Nintendo's fortunes was the game in watch, which we haven't, we're an hour in and still haven't even mentioned that. I forgot that was already going on right here too. Yeah, that's okay. Okay. Yeah, I mean, honestly, at this point, maybe we should save his video game era type stuff for another episode.

Like I don't want this one to go on too long. And I still feel like there's some interesting things to talk about from the 70s and early 80s before, you know, before you get into video games, because he also designed like little handheld toys and amusements. You know, Rubik's Cube. Yeah, Rubik's Cube was a huge, huge hit around the world, and everyone of the planet had a Rubik's Cube or three. And Nintendo was like, we got to get in on that.

But of course, they couldn't just make a Rubik's Cube. So it kind of fell to Yochoy to come up with the Rubik's Cube killer, the, you know, you know, basically their own in-house rip-off. At least their answer to Rubik's Cube. Well, and it's interesting because... That came out after they were doing video game stuff. So it's not a pivot. Like, that was actually kind of a throwback in a lot of ways.

19... 10 billion came out in 81, I think? Yeah, I mean, they hadn't... To me, I really kind of consider Nintendo getting into video games to be the launch of the Famicom. Because prior to the Famicom launch in July, 1983, they didn't really do internal game development. I mean, basically the closest they had come to making their own game

was to take the Donkey Kong board and reverse engineer that to make Donkey Kong Jr. And that was a project that Yokoai headed up. And Ikegami was kind of like, hey, guys, what, what's going on here? Well, that led to a lawsuit, as I recall. Well, that and the fact that Nintendo, basically Nintendo contracted with Ikigami to produce X number of Donkey Kong cabinets and boards.

I think just the boards and then Nintendo made the cabinets and then Donkey Kong turned into this huge hit so instead of buying more boards from Ikigami Nintendo was like well this is our property so we're just going to make the boards ourselves and so I think Ikegami ended up sourcing like a tenth of the boards

that were eventually made of Donkey Kong some some minuscule number some small percentage and they were like well you know we kind of did this like what's going on. We're getting cut out of our own creation here. But Nintendo was, you know, they felt like they came up with the design. It was Miyamoto and Yoquay working together. This is actually touching on something that I think probably, especially younger listeners, won't realize, which is that they made their money back in the day by selling arcade boards. You were like

physically selling, like, of course, that, you know, making money off the quarters and things like that was how the arcades made revenue, but how Nintendo made revenue was by selling the machines themselves. And by selling the machines, that meant selling the boards, which is exactly why, for instance, you know, when Midway pirated basically Pac-Man to make Miz Pac-Man, Namcoe took it because the Ms. Pac-Man thing was an add-on to the original Pac-Man board. You had to keep buying Namco Pac-Man boards to make Ms. Pac-Man's. But if you're like actually, you know, bootlegging something and selling a totally different circuit board, you're undercutting, you're totally basically taking money out of the maker's pocket.

So, and that's what I think was going on with, that's why Ikigami Tsukhii was so upset, you know, they're actually physically manufacturing these boards and now suddenly Nintendo's like, actually, we don't need those anymore. Yeah, and something worth understanding, too, is that trademark and copyright, where software is concerned was still very much the Wild West at that point. Like, there weren't really good legal precedence to say, like, you know, what in software is copyrighted, what belongs to whom? because Nintendo came up with, you know, with Donkey Kong. They came up with the graphics. They came up with the design of the game. They came up with the layouts of the boards. They came up with the power-up scheme and things like that.

Right. Ikegami Sushinki came up with the code that described that, the actual physical boards, the program. And so then the question becomes like, whose game is this? And that was in the legal system throughout most of the 80s. And eventually the question was settled in a different case. And within like six months of that case being settled and resolved by the court's Nintendo

and Ikigami settled out of court because I think it became clear at that point, like here's who is in the wrong, here's who is in the right. And instead of, you know, going through the costly proceedings, let's just sort things out quietly off the record. Well, and also had Nintendo poached like Ikegami's entire coding staff by that point? Had they? I really don't know.

I thought my impression and like I really need to go back and read this. I think there were a lot of hires from Ikegami into Nintendo, which is how they bootstrapped themselves. That's something I hadn't heard. I mean, that would make sense. If you're building up your own programming department

and this one company's done most of your programming, you might say, hey, come on over. We're building this thing called a Famicom computer. Well, Nintendo had a history of doing that kind of poaching, you know, from Sharp with the Uymuir and people like that. And actually, it's very forward-looking. It's very Silicon Valley. You know what I mean? There weren't NDAs or anything like that back then.

That's why you don't see real names in Japanese video game, like credit scrolls throughout the 80s. It's funny if Nintendo's behavior caused the creation of like Yuki Chan's Papa because Nintendo was the one poaching. It'd be funny if that's what happened. Oh, no, everyone was doing that. I mean, you mentioned Yuki Chan's Papa from. a Mega Man 2. But, you know, that stuff happened with Capcom. Like, there was this constant back and forth of stealing talent. And I was just watching a video by, um, Kid Finneras, Todd Seulek, who was recently on the lunar episode of Retronauts. He's started a series on little-known

developers. And, you know, he's talking about Ukiote, uh, the company that made games like hook and Skyblazer. And they were basically like a guy from Capcom who did, designed Gargoyle's Quest and was like, yeah, I'm done here. Peace out. I'm taking a bunch of my friends with me. So, like, that happened all the time. And I'm sure it happened, you know, in the U.S. industry, too. Well, in Japan, in Japan, did you have a Lunar episode? I have to tune to that yet. But it will be by the time this is, because, you know, Heroku, that was actually Lunar Silver Star story was Hiroko in my, like, that was our second localization job ever. Oh, yeah, no kidding. Yeah, that was a, that was an interesting experience working with working

designs. But anyway, back to the original topic. Wow, I should have had you on that episode. That would have been you should you missed out buddy um the no we don't have much to say we localized it the end uh yeah that's all it was although we were this is this is a true story we were localizing it on like paper we were printing out the code they just gave us like the raw code and like it wasn't like it is now where all the dialogue is split out into an excel file we had to like hunt for it and because of the limit we didn't really have laptops and we needed to work away from the house for various reasons. So we'd print out these sheets of that old school printer paper with like the ratchet holes on the side.

And Heroquin, I would write in the translations and then I'd go back later and enter them into the code where they needed to be. And God, it was a real, that was a real pain in the ass. But anyway, salary men. Like, it was kind of unheard of in Japan to like leap companies like that, I think. Nintendo was sort of ahead of the curve in convincing people to come work forward, I think. But yeah, my understanding is this whole poaching thing really did start right around the time of the invaders boom because everyone wanted to be in video games

and at the time in Japan there was a very limited talent pool of people who really understood programming and coding and so they were in very high demand and so you know companies who got a hold of them were very protective and really did their best not to let their names be known not to make people realize like oh we've got we've got this gold mine right here that's right we've got So, yeah, that's just something kind of built into the industry, I think. And not to drag this episode on any longer than it has to, but that kind of ties into what you guys were saying earlier about Nintendo also being smart enough to recognize that you don't have to be a programmer to have good game design ideas because there was some scruffy-headed little weirdo who was designing some of the console shells for the color TV game watch thing. What was his name again? His name was Larry something, Larry Stencombs?

If we can get through this whole episode without mentioning his name, about an episode of Gumpi-Y-O-Cla. Sorry, I've already mentioned him. Go back and edit it out so we could just do that one thing. So shall we save the rest of this for Hot Shots part due? Yeah, I think so. There's a few other things to talk about in the 60s or 70s. And I think the most important thing to talk about, at least I've talked about this on

the show before, but it's just a thing that I love. And I think it makes a great segue into the next time we talk about their video games and the video games that Yo Koi worked on and his comments. consoles and concepts, and that is the lefty RX remote control car. Do you guys know about this one? You know, I don't know the lefty R. I knew a guy named Lefty Rx once, but... He was a doctor and he could only operate with his left hand.

Lefty. So the Lefty RX was a remote control car. At the time, this was in the like the mid-70s, I think. And at the time, RC cars were pretty expensive, like, you know, $50, $60 in, you know, in 70s money, so pricey. And Nintendo really wanted to produce one that could be affordable for everyone. And so Yokoai came up with the lefty RX.

And it's called the lefty RX because it can only turn left. It does not have the ability to turn right. It has a steering wheel or like a button that it has like forward. And I think it's the controller is forward and left. And it doesn't have the mechanisms built in to allow the wheels to actually

rotate all the way to the right. And it doesn't have the electronics and the buttons to actually rotate all the way to the right. So the steering frame goes straight ahead and it goes left. And that cut the price of this device, this toy, way down. It was like half the price of other remote control cars. Because it's only half the direction. Right. And it still looked nice. That's the starburst on the box. Right. It still looks nice, but only half the directions. But the thing is like... Simple to control. You know, if it's a race car going around a track, it's fine.

If you're just going around like a standard indie track, you know, it's a circle. So you only need to turn life. Or like a light cycle. Yeah. It's a tron. Actually, this, actually, that mechanism was pretty common in battery op robots of the time, too. I don't know what it is. They would only turn in one direction.

So that's actually, that's interesting. I hadn't, I didn't realize anybody actually made a toy car that way. And that is, Lefty RX is the quintessential Yokoi creation because it is like here is a thing that lets you have something very similar to the experience that other people pay a lot of money for. And you have some compromises here, but those compromises will save you a lot of money. Some would say broken toy, but yeah. Almost, but it's by design. That's some pretty lateral thinking with withered technology. Oh, you had to say.

I was hoping we can get through that without that thing too, but hey, what are you going to do? Well, you know, because there's nothing more withered than the concepts of left and right. Withered, exactly. These have been established for a while, you know? Yeah, the whole commercial for the Leftier-R-X is like, you know, right is so stupid.

Only stupid people go right. Cool people go left. And the Yoko puts on his sunglasses and walks to a wall because it's right left to him. Yeah. They call me lefty. The world's most sinister racing car. That is Nintendo in a nutshell.

And I'm sure they probably sold a decent number of those toys and no one complained. Yes, they did very well because they cost half of what other RC cars did. So if you were a kid on a very limited budget and your parents could not afford or would not give you a proper RC car,

you could still have an approximation of the racing experience with this scaled down compromised race car. Wait a second. Was there an upgrade pack? for turning right for those kids who were not. Yeah, that was the lefty RX advance. That's where they get

you, man, on the upgrades. When you want to turn the other direction. They should sell real cars like this. Think about how much more money you could make if you had to pay extra to turn right. But that is Greg. I know we never actually got around to talking about the Game Boy, but that really does that just, the Game Boy was the Lefty RX

of portable gaming. Absolutely. Everyone looked at it and said, why would you want to play on this P-Soup green screen piece of crap game thing and Nintendo was like no that's the point it's cheap and easy and they're like hey you can have you can have a system and tetris and Mario and you know like three other games for the cost of the Atari Links hardware so why not and that screen however I think we need to be very clear about that actually gave Yo Koi no like that really messed him up like he was he was a mess that is a conversation for next time I think I think this is a good stopping point actually

Okay, okay, you game boys So I lied with my intro First of five podcast episodes about the life and times A gunn't pay you a boy It's like Arnold Schwarzenegger Remember what I said I talk about Game Boy last I lied And we just dropped Jeremy off a cliff

It is lefty RX Yeah, that's it's fine This happens a lot with retronauts I feel like if we are having a good informative conversation, why rush it, why truncate it? Just, you know, let it expand. And there's still a lot to talk about Yo-Koi's video game work. So, you know, this was actually kind of a fun recap of Nintendo's prehistory that we haven't really discussed in, you know, thoroughly on retronauts before. So it's good. And what I like about this, if we had to run long, at least it was only

because Matt had so much actually kind of new information. We weren't just regertitating everything from David Sheff's game over for the upteenth time. Oh, guys, I love it when you, I love it when you talk about regurgitation. Oh. Jesus. Thank you. Yeah, no. It's a hobby.

No, actually, I'm just glad to get this out because, honestly, I wanted to include more of it in Pure Invention, my book out recently, but I want, seriously, I wanted to include more of it in pure invention, but just because of the way things got edited, we had to deep six a lot of the research that I had done on Nintendo's early years. And just like you're saying, aside from Chef's book, There's not, and also Florent Gorge's. Yeah, I think Giorgette. How do you put?

Yeah, the French guy, yeah. Georgesi. And his and Isou-Yama... And yes, Issao Yamazaki? Sorry, just cracking up when he said that. And his partner, anyway, those books have some really, really great stuff on Nintendo's early history, too. But they're not really widely available as the problem. No, I did manage to get the Georges books when they were briefly in print in English,

and now they're, like, extremely expensive because they're very out of print. I have to give credit where credits do. I only was able to borrow my copies briefly from one Brian Ashcraft, who has, like, the world's largest collection of, like, Japanese, you know, books on Japanese topics in his house. Is he one of those hoarders? Does he live in, like, a cave made, just lined with books? A giant hobod out Famicon.

Like, you know, like the Dr. Slump characters live in a giant pot of coffee. No, I don't think so. I was thinking more like those hoarders on the video series that Florent Georges actually recently has been publishing and translating into English. Oh, really? Oh, have you not seen that?

Oh, okay. I'll share the link with you guys. I can't remember what it's called. I'd never heard of that either, yeah. Is this collector's quest? Yes, collector's quest. That's it. Cison 3?

Yeah, season 3. The first two episodes are with this guy who, like, it's really alarming. how many books he has. But this is the same guy who wrote these and translated some of these books. So it's all relevant. Like he's very knowledgeable about this stuff and has done a lot of great work to bring some interesting facets of Japanese gaming culture to the West, mostly to France. But some of it does make its way to English and English.

So highly recommended. Check those out. Well do. All right. Cool. So that's a lot of Gunpei Yokoi stuff that has nothing to do with Game Boy. So I guess we'll get there next time. We'll record again sometime soon. How's that? Sounds great. Yeah, we didn't even get to game and watch. Nope. That's like, that's pretty amazing. Yeah, how do we screw up that badly, but in a good way? Exactly. All right. Well, this, this has been an episode of Retronauts. Thanks everyone for listening. You can find Retronauts on your favorite podcast catchers and on the Greenlit podcast network and at Retronauts.com. every Monday, and you can support us by going to patreon.com slash retronauts, which means you get the episodes that come out a week early ahead of the public with no advertisements or cross-promotions

with a higher bitrate quality, so they sound nice. And if you support us at $5 a month or more, you also get extra episodes every other Friday and weekly columns and little mini podcast by Diamond Fight and maybe some other stuff. I don't know, we're always kind of mixing up the the mix. We're mixing the mix. Yes, that's what we do. We mix the mix here on Retronauts. Where can we find you guys? Matt, tell us about where we can find your work on the internet and how we can support your book. You can find me on, I'm on Twitter at Matt Underbar Alt. I am on Instagram at Alt, Matt Alt. And I'm at your favorite bookstore as Pure Invention, Colin, how Japanese pop culture conquered the world.

It's a good book. I've been reading it. Go buy it. Thank you. Check it out. Thank you. No, seriously, it honors me that people like you guys liked it. Seriously, I wrote it for people like you. And people like the listeners, all of you. All we heard about, because of the most recent episode that you were on in the podcast, convince me to pick it up.

Oh, that's funny. Well, there you go. That's really funny. That's great. And Bill, where can we find you and support your work and listen to your podcast? I am just muddron, my last name, M-U-D-R-O-N at Twitter.com. My podcast is tardypodcast.com. We're known as tardy to the party.

It's a podcast where my podcast co-host and I We just tackle old movies and TV shows and stuff We've never watched before And we finally get around to watching that stuff for the first time And yeah And I've got a shop on big cartel.com Just yeah, I think it's just a muddron at big cartel I sell

By the time this is airing Hopefully I should have a new series of kind of Japanese print-inspired Legend of Zelda print So if that's not up there I must have screwed up badly But in the meantime I do have prints about like studio jibbley films and other kinds of artwork prints and things you can buy so go check that out but that's that's me all right guys thank you both for being on the show um oh thank you myself yes you can find me on twitter is games bite you can find me doing retronaut stuff

you can find me doing limited run game stuff and you can also find me on youtube doing uh video stuff uh lots like i'm in the middle of like a one year streak of actually covering very little and Nintendo content. Yeah, that's cool. I like that you're broadening your horizons into all kinds of weird stuff. Yeah, well, you know, sometimes you just got to mix things up.

I'm mixing the mix. It's what we do. And when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Set of Wise Man. That sounds great. So that's all about you. It's actually Hunter S. Thompson.

But it's also you. Oh, well, there you go. I thought that was a Jack Burton. All right. So, yeah, so it was a great. half-conversation. Guys, thank you again for your time, and we definitely should finish this conversation up sometime, so I'll be in touch, and in the meantime, thanks everyone for listening, and we'll be

back in a week with more podcasts, because we've got to mix the mix. That's what we do. Thank you. Thank you.